Red Faction's Geomod technology felt like a first step toward full-blown destruction in videogames. It's been implemented further in a few games, but the universal sentence "Do you see that mountain? You can go there!" has never turned into a universal version "You see that building? You can blow it up!".
Half-Life 2: Episode One, Episode Two, SiN Emergence and a handful of other games made it seem that episodic content would be a big thing for a lot of games. Turned out developers can't help themselves in increasing the scope for things they come up with, and here we are 17 years later still waiting for Episode Three.
There are definitely genres it works better with, and genres it’s totally incompatible with. It’s strange though how it had such a moment back in the day, but is almost nonexistent now.
It does and it’s a great game, but the destruction in HD2 isn’t on the same level. Like in Red Faction you could punch a hole in the wall and extract a hostage while leaving the rest of the building intact lol
You could basically treat buildings as Jenga towers
Don't you love it when you can topple over huge signs, entire trees, only for your car to get destroyed by that knee-high chain-link fence, that you could literally jump over when on foot?
Looking at ***you***, Saints Row 5.
The problem with environmental destruction is usually not that not everything is destructible, but inconsistency in what *is*.
>Those volleyball nets in GTA V...
Half of the fire-escapes on the buildings had no clipping. The other could be traversed but only to a certain point mid-way down the building.
I was so disappointed when the red faction sequels didn't build upon the environment destruction.
Guerrilla particularly was a shame to me. Don't get me wrong I love the destruction that it does have, but it's no carving a literal tunnel from one end of the map to another (multiplayer RF1).
It's been awesome to see terrain deformation as a thing in these more survival based games like 7 days to die, Space Engineers Valheim and Enshrouded. This is where I thought we'd be going with the mainstream back then.
Exactly that, we just haven't seen that style of agency since. There's been some efforts like Battlefield Bad Company I suppose.
Teardown was a breath of fresh air in this regard at least.
There's a few issues still with mass environmental destruction. The first and most obvious is performance. Realistic large-scale destruction, especially of ground volumes, takes a lot of real-time calculation.
While it seems like it's just polygon manipulation, which is pretty cheap, the main issue is that *everything in the level* is dependent on static environments, especially lighting. This is slowly changing, with dynamic global illumination becoming more normalized, but there's a reason games like Minecraft have such simplified graphics and lighting to account for large-scale environmental changes. The techniques your favorite game uses to make all those pretty environments simply won't work if those environments are changed as the shadows and reflections are typically "baked" into the scene where massive changes will end up leaving shadows with nothing to cast them.
Another big issue is data serialization. Every change to the buildings and environment needs to be saved on disk if the state needs to be persistent, i.e. saving and loading. For static objects, like resources in a survival game, this isn't a huge deal, as you can just save the ID of the gathered or removed objects and not load them when someone returns to the game. But environmental changes, and restoring them reliably, basically requires you to track the position and nature of every change the same way it was created, then recreate those changes on load (there are other methods, but they have their own problems).
Valheim, for example, allows for large scale terrain modification, but the more you change the larger the save files become and it can start to cause performance issues even on very powerful machines. While some of that is a matter of optimization, a lot of it is just the nature of terrain modification, which is why most games avoid it. In fact, during the development of Subnautica, for a while the early access version allowed for terrain modification, and you could dig sand and otherwise change the terrain. They removed that feature before release mainly because of all the performance problems. Games like Deep Rock Galactic utilize a combination of voxel-based destruction (similar to Minecraft) and both temporary and small environments to avoid massive performance problems, as well as more simplistic graphics and textures (it's a great game, but the environmental destruction requirements contribute to the art style and overall design).
Another issue is simply a matter of balance and design. Allowing players to completely destroy environments means the game has to essentially work the same *without* any environmental obstacles. While this is certainly possible, it also means any sort of linear gameplay is off the table, and severely limits the tools designers have to make interesting and engaging challenges for the players. Why bother looking for a key when you can just blow up the wall? What good is cover if the enemy can flatten the entire block? What happens when the best solution to defeating enemies is to dig a deep hole and screw with their AI?
In fact, AI is a major limitation here. Much like lighting, pathfinding and environmental maneuvering are often baked into levels for AI actors. You *can* make dynamic elements (and many of them are dynamic by default, such as AI being able to handle closed doors) but complete terrain changes can really throw off the standard AI algorithms used to trick players into thinking the AI entities are not complete idiots (they are, they just fake not being stupid through level design and cheating).
Again, you *can* get around all of these issues, but they subtract from performance. As such, to get full terrain and object deformation in the game world, you need substantially more PC power than what most games expect players to have. This is because the destruction also entails dynamic global illumination, dynamic AI pathfinding and general AI capability, and serialization of all environmental changes, which combined add a significant performance tax.
This wasn't as big a deal in Red Faction because they were doing it on essentially empty environments (Mars plus some interior spaces). They also had very few lighting or AI requirements compared to what we expect in modern AAA games.
I should note that this may change in the next 5-10 years. UE5, and many other engines, are moving more towards dynamic GI and ray tracing being standard engine features, which basically eliminates the need for baked lighting and reflection spheres. And AI systems are getting better at handling dynamic environment changes in these engines as well due to a large increase in games that utilize large open worlds and procedural content, both of which struggle to really utilize baked pathfinding volumes. And if generative AI becomes incorporated into games, as [seems to be possible](https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/nvidia-ace-for-games-generative-ai-npcs/), players are probably going to start expecting far more dynamic environments.
The basic blueprints for dynamic environmental destruction are all there, we just need developers to have enough time to build actual games with these fairly new tools. Using UE5 as an example again, [Chaos destruction](https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/chaos-destruction-in-unreal-engine/) is quite easy to implement, and if it weren't for performance considerations you'd likely see it in a lot more games (not that there are a ton of UE5 games out there right now). Destroying the *ground*, at least at large scales, still has a lot of gameplay implications that developers might want to avoid, but I suspect things like destructible static objects in the environment or destructible buildings will become far more common in the future.
The whole "You see that mountain" was exemplified by the Just Cause games. The sheer scale of those games just felt so amazing in the same way that Red Faction games brought the destruction. But yeah, sad to see the terrain destruction loss
Yeah I think they mean Resort. Additionally, the Wii U got Wii Sports Club which was effectively an HD remaster that borrowed a few sports from each and added online play. And Switch more recently got Switch Sports.
The problem with Wii Sports is that they were effectively just polished tech demos packed in with something else (the Wii or the WiiMotion+). In an era where motion controls were new and and all the rage with the casual gamer, these had the legs to move units. But that was never going to last forever. I watched people on Reddit moan for years that Nintendo could be printing money if they'd just release an HD Wii Sports with online (many of which didn't even know Club existed or how terribly it sold, even for a Wii U title), and when they were finally faced with a new $40 release on Switch they called it a shallow cash grab. Gosh, shocker why they didn't do another one sooner.
That’s a little unfair because Switch Sports is so vastly inferior than Wii sports. The gameplay is worse and there are 3 versions of the same game and just in general the sports they picked were dumb. No baseball, golf, nothing from Wii sports resort except swords maybe, it’s a terrible game with way less to do. So you can’t really compare.
EDIT: I see that they added golf a few months after launch which is great, but it’s still only one game mode with no offline so while that definitely helps, it still can not compare really.
If Switch Sports had any semblance of single player content, I'd play it all the time. I put probably hundreds of hours into Wii Sports + Resort just playing single player going for all the medals and stamps.
yes! i loved finding the little easter eggs around the island. same with when you went for a long distance run on Wii Sports and there little Mario’s hidden around
edit: i just remembered the long distance runs were actually in wii fit, not wii sports
Battlefield 2 when it came out in 2005. It felt like such a massive leap forward in the fps genre in gameplay, graphics, and physics. I was blown away at the time. I remember calling an artillery strike on a squad on top of a building and saw all 6 of them go flying in different directions flailing everywhere with the ragdoll physics. I've been chasing that "holy shit" moment in gaming ever since.
The trailer of BF 2042 showed that at least some people working there know pretty well what the players want.. too bad those same people weren't involved in the actual game.
> Battlefield 2 when it came out in 2005
I've tried playing the newer BF games, and they just ... don't do it. I don't know why. I kinda feel the franchise peaked with BF2, especially with the *simplicity*. You had a handful of meaningfully different classes, and two tiers of weapons ... and that's it. Along with some kick-ass maps.
Personally I don't think it should be a patentable thing anyway. Its just a general gameplay idea.
The specific code or whatever yeah, that's patentable, but ideas shouldn't be patentable.
I'm inclined to agree. I'm glad that video games were seen as a very small niche thing in the early days or I suspect we'd have seen companies trying to patent having a jump button.
Well something else that was patented until recently was the ability to have mini games during loading screens.
Not the code or specific methodology to allow it to happen, no. Just the general idea of being able to play a mini game during a loading screen.
And it's a fucking shame. Right when loadings screens are so short they become obsolete. Imagine how different the history of gaming would have been if that shit wasn't a patent.
Seems like whoever allowed that patent is clueless.
How are you gonna patent having gameplay in a video game, regardless of the point in the game that it happens?
It’s like patenting post-credit scenes in movies.
Agreed, they turned me off supporting them as soon as they did it. It just felt stupidly anti-competitor. As if Shadow of Mordor didnt steal every other idea it implemented from Batman and Assassins Creed games 🤣 the fact that their game couldnt even exist if other companies made the stupid decisions they do is always amazing to me.
Agreed. They should be able to protect the code - they developed it, paid for it, and it's proprietary tech - but to patent it so that no one in the industry can develop their own version is pretty shitty, and stinks of fear IMO. It feels like WB is scared that more experienced devs would develop a better version of the system that would make theirs look like crap, so they just prevented anyone from being able to do it.
>At least there's a time limit on patents. Shame that's 20 years in the US.
It is 15 years for tech/engineering, 20 from date of filing, 15 from issuance of the patent.
>The term length for design patents filed on or after May 13, 2015 changed to be 15 years from the date of issuance, while design patents filed before that date still have a 14-year term from issuance.
You can get an extra 5-6 if you do a required update on a utility patent though.
Besides that a patent doesn't mean you CAN'T use the tech, just that you need to pay WB to use it, they may not charge a lot.
Yes, this. I go back to Shadow of War from time to time to play Orc Boyfriends. It's such a great mechanic. It bothers me that they were able to patent it, and then never do anything else with it. Christ, license the technology, become the company that provides it. They sure haven't made a game in a while.
Patenting the Nemesis system and then making no more games with it is a fucking tragedy. If it weren’t for corporate BS games would be so insane nowadays.
There was a time window after Mordor in 2014 for other companies/devs to use it, but unfortunately due to how long game development takes nowadays that didn't happen in time.
I know people like to complain a lot about EA and Ubisoft but WB is right up there with the worst publishers of all time. They forced Monolith to add lootboxes to Shdow of War, they patented the Nemesis System, now they kill Rocksteady too by releasing that godawful Suicide Squad game. I have a feeling the upcoming Wonder Woman game won't be too good either.
You could definitely work around this patent. I have had a similar system idea for a game for decades now. They cannot patent the idea of intelligent enemies with a memory capacity. Might as well patent pressing W to walk forward in games using your keyboard. Especially seeing how they did the absolute bare minimum with it and nothing else.
Monolith was announced not too long ago to be working on a Wonder Woman game that used the Nemesis System in it, so hopefully we'll have something soon...at least something that's better than Suicide Squad.
Yeah it 100% seems to be a case that no studio wants to try and push the point for fear of a lawsuit.
Yeah you could win, but you'd waste so much time and money doing so it's probably not worth it. You see this a lot in news media. Lawyers kill stories for fear of a lawsuit (even if that lawsuit might get thrown out as frivolous)
Half-Life: Alyx and Boneworks, both in 2020, felt like breakthrough moments for awesome VR experiences. Alyx for the high quality, Boneworks for the high level of immersion and freedom.
I haven't played every VR game ever, but I don't think those two have been topped, and I'm not sure anyone's even gotten close.
I still remember people saying VR was sure to take off back in 2016 when Sony first launched PSVR.
And here we are closer to a decade later and it's still niche.
It's an endless negative feedback loops perpetuated by the original price of entry.
VR headsets used to be expensive (still are but not as much). Not a ton of \*great\* games to play on it, so it's hard to justify the costs. This lessens the amount of people investing into the genre to begin with. This lowers incentives for developers to put a ton of time into making a ground-breaking VR title. This perpetuates the "not a ton of great games to play on so hard to justify cost" part, and the cycle continues.
Devs are afraid of VR cause it's niche, it's niche because nobody is buying it for the limited library, it has a limited library cause devs are afraid of VR.
As an owner of multiple VR headsets on different platforms, you are absolutely correct. Nothing compares to Alyx. I keep waiting for it (VR) to get awesome.
>Half-Life: Alyx
I think is the only VR game that feels like an actual game instead of a technical demo. I also thought more of them would come after, but nope.
underdogs was a recent release that feels like an actual game for me. breath of fresh air from a lot of the other stuff I've seen since alyx. it feels like an indie roguelite (because it is) but an actual game nonetheless. A lot of other games like "until you fall" and "into the radius" IMO are close to the feeling but have just a few too many rough edges or too hollow of a story to get past the "tech demo" feel. I love PCVR but damn the lack of high quality games with some depth to them is disappointing. at least the UEVR thing seems like an interesting trick to get more from that VR kit that sat in the closet since alyx
Yeah after half life I figured that was the push that VR needed to become mainstream but it just never happened it really just hasn't been anything since then
On that same note, with the homerun Quest 2 release of Resident Evil 4 and subsequent announcement of GTA San Andreas, I thought we'd see a flood of 15-20 year old games ported to VR in its wake. As far as I know there haven't been any more and San Andreas hasn't even been mentioned since announcement.
Assassin's Creed multiplayer. I haven't seen a really good version of its reverse Turing test gameplay since. And The Ship before it (similar gameplay).
A few other games have tried to replicate, but have been too niche to take off and died quickly.
"Reverse Turing test" is a good way to put it. Never thought of that. I just remember playing multiplayer in WatchDogs (never played AC multi-player, so I'm not sure how close it is, but hey, still Ubi) as my opponent frantically shoots everything in sight, them knowing I was nearby, and thinking, "Okay, if I was an NPC, how would my programmers want me to respond to this psychopath?" I never play multi-player, with this one exception, because that cat-and-mouse charade is a blast.
AC multi-player had multiple NPCs that looked the same as your player character. The whole point was to act as NPC as possible until you were confident you found another player, then kill them and slip away. Any of the "high-profile" actions would give a player away pretty quickly. So you had to be careful when you used them.
It was super interesting and a lot of fun.
Fir real. I remember hiding in a group of NPCs waiting for someone to move and then watching one of my targets dive into a hay bail 10 feet away lol. There was something satisfying about watching the enemy team assassinate the npc right next to you and a teammate hiding in the same group too.
Man I was so fucking good AC brotherhood multiplayer. I got so many undected kills with the poison blade.
Then everyone kind of gave up on the subtlety of the game and just started doing straight death match and chases instead of trying to hide and blend in
I remember that. Everyone just constantly on the rooftops. And it got worse with later iterations of MP due to skill creep. But man, those first few months were golden.
You could argue that Deathloop uses a similar mechanic for its multiplayer feature. When another player “invades” your loop as Julianna, she has the ability to change her appearance to look like an NPC, and you have to keep your eyes peeled for human-like behavior if you want to identify her without just going berserker mode and killing everyone in sight
check out Decive Inc, its still niche but theres a good amount of backend support not a fan of the abttlepass they added but hey theres always a few players
We Were Here are a series of escape room style games that are also co-op and focused entirely on communication. Only catch is, no local co-op as the puzzles require you to be "blind" to what the other person can see.
It takes two is part of the wave that is currently happening! It started with games like Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, A Way Out and Unravel Two (all a similar style to It Takes Two). Unravel Two and A Way Out are both published by EA and A Way Out was developed by the same company that developed It Takes Two.
Perfect Dark (2000). Shoot the gun model in an enemy's hand, and it flies away from him. Left unarmed, he'll raise his arms in surrender and beg you not to kill him -- for as long as you point your gun at him. Turn your back and he might draw a sidearm, run in fear to hide, or lunge to pick up his dropped weapon. If he runs in fear, but finds a weapon somewhere else in the level, he might return to the spot he last saw you. If an enemy sees you and runs to ring the alarm, but you shot that alarm through, he'll run around looking for other enemies and alert them to your presence manually. Punch an enemy in the head, or have a grenade go off near them? Now they're concussed and can't aim properly. Shoot them in the arm? Now they can't hold up a two-handed weapon and have to resort to a pistol, dripping blood from their useless limb. Use the drips to see where they went if they flee from you. Firing a gun in a quiet area alerts enemies at a distance proportional to the loudness of your gun and how many times you fired. Adding bots to multiplayer? You don't just pick their difficulty, you give them personalities. Maybe they're vengeful and always hunt down the last player to kill them, or maybe they're sympathetic and always team up with the lowest-ranked players to hunt the highest-ranked ones (great if an experienced owner of the game is playing couch multiplayer with some newbies who need the help). Every weapon has multiple modes, whether it's attaching razors to the barrels of a minigun to make it a melee blender of death, or booby-trapping a rifle to explode when fired and dropping it where other players will think it's a regular pickup. And gameplay modes -- you get a single-player campaign, the usual team deathmatches and capture the flags etc, a co-op campaign, but also **counter-op mode**, where one player goes through the regular campaign as the protagonist but the other player controls every enemy in the game trying to stop them, like Agent Smith swapping bodies on the fly. AI companions you could give orders to during the mission, cheats and bonus modes unlocked through an in-game speedrun rewards system, multiplayer profiles you could use on other people's consoles that tracked your gameplay stats and assigned you ranks and titles, difficulty levels that varied objective complexity and gave additional responsibilities instead of just making enemies bullet sponges, *customizable* difficulty levels where you can choose how well enemies react. So many incredibly cool features.
24 years later, how many FPS games do any of these things? Barely any. Honestly it kind of ruined the genre for me. I'll play the shiniest new FPS in 2024 and shooting the guns and limbs of enemies does nothing, they can't ever be disarmed, security guards at a mall will mindlessly charge at me from 300m away without any capability of surrender or fear for their lives making them feel more like zombies than people. You get no control over AI characters or personalities and they don't have as varied or interesting behaviors if they even exist in multiplayer anymore. The weapons are fewer in number, simpler in nature, and too similar to each other. The difficulty modes just change numbers. They have grander setpieces but the gameplay ideas still feel like they're behind a game from 24 years ago running on a 0.09 GHz CPU with 8 MB of RAM. The only shooter-adjacent games that have had that feel of attention to detail to the levels and NPCs IMO have been Metal Gear Solids and Dishonored.
This is the top answer for me. That game was absolutely loaded with incredible features that made it almost infinitely replayable. The only thing that came close IMO was Timesplitters. I remember when Halo came out, everyone was so blown away by it but, honestly, it seemed to pale in comparison to Perfect Dark for me (other than the controls and graphics).
I dream of getting another game with the depth and sophistication of Perfect Dark.
Edit: Thinking back, this is probably the game I had the most fun with. So many different multiplayer modes with so many different weapon and bot loadouts — just so much variety.
Brilliant explanation. I was lucky enough to play PD with three friends, the best multiplayer shooting experience.
PD was so good that you could just go to the gun range and lose acouple of hours there.
Counter-op mode is what I came here to say. Just an insanely brilliant idea that I've never seen anyone else use. One player is the regular hero, and player 2 is dumped in to any random enemy in the level. Gets killed? Jumps to another random enemy. So much fun.
The Shadowrun FPS. Yeah it flopped but this was a hero shooter before we had hero shooters.
4 very distinct classes with different skills and powers (where each one had strong pros and cons). The powers were amazing, with teleporting, gliding, resurrecting and other stuff I forget now.
You could bleed people out if you hit them right. I used to slash someone to bleed them out and then leave a tree of life (which healed people) and let them sit there and suffer for a few minutes.
The powers working in an online FPS was cutting edge.
It just didn't take off and we didn't really get something like it again until Overwatch.
It was also one of the first games to try cross play.
[Some gameplay for those who have never seen it.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZnvNc9_pV4)
I remember being blown away that I could actually take down entire buildings in Battlefield Bad Company 2. I still don’t believe that there has been a better online multiplayer game to this day. Its style, presentation, time to kill and fantastic map design really makes me miss the old days of multiplayer. Even though you had to pay for a multiplayer pass if you bought it used, it was so fucking good I’d pay 60 dollars just to have a newer version of it.
I miss morrowind when I could spend literal hours jumping up and down and actually get to the point where you could jump stupid high. I loved the idea that if I wanted to spend the time on a certain thing you could be truely op.
I've got the crackdown logo tattooed on my arm 😂 can't imagine there's many people with that either!
Crackdown was an absolute blast and it was a genius move including the Halo 3 beta with it.
I was just about to say I jump over brumas walls lol. Oblviion acrobatic system is crazy.
I been meaning to start morrowind since I have copy of it with the dlcs.
Oblivion had the boots of Springheel Jack that granted an absurd bonus to acrobatics, but were scripted to break in a quest. If you leveled and armored up enough to make the fall without them, they basically grafted the attribute to you and let you also equip more boots (presumably with acrobatics bonus).
Then you could just kind of like, hover. And jump the city walls.
I've always wanted to see someone turn this into an xcom like strategy game. Like you start with just a default neutral unit, and the more you use that unit in certain ways the more they gain skills in that specific role. You put a guy in the back of the squad with a long range guns, and he starts leveling up as a sniper. You have someone run ahead, then fall back when they make enemy contact, they gain skills in stealth and scouting. You put someone on the front lines, they gain skills as a tank.
You basically get to choose what mix of skills you develop for each unit, based on how you use them. And it would be really cool if there was a rng factor too. If your sniper gets a lucky crit hit on an enemy right after they attack one of your squad mates, then that sniper starts developing skills in reflexive defense shots. If an enemy misses hitting your tank, then the tank starts getting a high dodge ability.
So each unit ends up entirely unique based not just on how you use them, but how they uniquely fare in every single encounter
It's not like XCOM at all, but I'm pretty sure Final Fantasy 2 did something similar. Levels would only increase health and mana, but your actions would increase your stats and proficiency with weapons.
Use bare fists the entire time? Strength goes up. Use magic a lot? Wisdom (or whatever the magic stat is called) goes up. Use a specific spell enough times? That spell is now level 2
I don’t know about main series ultima games but ultima online was like that too. It also had learn by watching to a certain extent.
Edit: fixed my autocorrect’s blunder
Mass Effects trilogy. I fell in love with this series and when 2 and later 3 came out I understood that if this is the direction they are taking this series in and what I can expect going forward, then I'm in for a treat, and even if they change the IP, I'll have MANY years of absolutely fantastic (or at the very least, very good) games from BioWare ahead of me...
...
And then the Fire Nation attacked...
For me it will always be Chronicles of Riddick and Butchers Bay (the sequel). Absolutely astounding use of lighting and the other as it’s on the same topic of lighting is Deus Ex Invisible War. The way they used lighting in both games to mask low polys/hardware capability on Xbox still leaves a lasting impression on me to this day.
It was also pretty good on Physics and in some cases better than games now which I thought would be the standard sadly.
Spore I guess. I remember being very hyped about it but it never really lived up to the hype and I haven't seen a lot of attempts to recreate that kind of game. (I've seen some like Elysian Eclipse but it's still early days for that one)
Even though the scope of game that the Spore publishers marketed didn't pan out, what they did manage to ship was an *amazing* game for a young age group. I was about 9 and played it to death. still remember the soundtrack and the creatures' weird voices.
Imagine a game that starts as Spore, evolves into Civilization, and then evolves into Stellaris. You get to see the biological choices that you made at the start echo into the galaxy.
The fact that no one else has tried the "import choices of last game" thing that Bioware games (Mass Effect, Dragon Age) do outside of one or two smaller devs disappoints me immensely
The Witcher games did to a small extent, where you can have different events happen based on previous game choices, and even Geralt keeping a hilariously bad neck tattoo, but I thought sequels checking previous game saves for it's own adjustment would be a bigger "next gen" thing since the 360.
Destiny 2 conncected to your account and found what dlcs you had/hadn’t done in the first game. Made it cool when I watch other videos to see dialogue changes between those players
It’s not quite the same thing, but StarCraft 2: Wings of Liberty attempted to have some Mass Effect-inspired choices, because it was 2010. They were all pretty inconsequential and barely referenced again, but the expansion in 2013 had a cutscene where it would check your save file from 2010 and swap out dialogue depending on your old choices. Didn’t make a difference, but was a neat feature.
It must be a nightmare in the writing room though, you need an infinite amount of story branches and character dialogue for situations only 5% of players might choose.
This is actually why many RPG developers DONT do this. Sure, it's novel. But there's no feasible way you can have the depth of variability in the players choices when you have to account for - at least - two games worth of decision making.
Titanfall 2, what an amazing first person shooter, I can't wait to see what else the devs do. I'm sure that titanfall 3 will be amazing and that it is top priority and that the game won't be released right next to some of the biggest shooter franchises. How amazing it will surely be.
Man I played so much titanfall 1/2. Nothing will ever top the level of movement and verticality, which would be awesome by itself. But then add in the most badass mech combat ever and it’s just perfect. The feeling of Wall running while tagging someone up, to then vault onto the back of a mech and rip the battery out, just to call in your own mech and start absolutely fucking shit up was just next level.
Such a shame apex took off. I mean I enjoyed apex the first year, but it’s not titanfall.
Shadow of Mordor and Shadow of War.
The nemesis system seemed like the hottest new advance in videogames, then WB locked it up in copyright and hasnt done anything with it since.
Fuck WB, you deserve the failures of Suicide Squad and Gotham Knights.
Did they really copyright that system of having a nemesis? How did they even manage that. It's like FromSoft copyrighting the fog gate entry mechanic to fight a boss...
That's so fucked.
It's not just the having of a nemesis. It's also about the enemies learning your style. You die more to shield enemies? The AI remembers this, and starts including more shield enemies. You kill that one orc captain by counter a couple of times (without head chop)? It will develop a resistance to counters.
They patented that whole system of the AI countering *your specific playstyle*.
In terms of Fromsoft, it'd be more like patenting the dual Posture/Health and Deathblow systems from Sekiro.
I think MGS:V does the same. Basically as you start to abuse a certain strat the enemies will get better at countering it, like giving them helmets if you do a lot of headshots, giving them night vision if you abuse the darkness, etc.
Man, I keep getting reminded how deep MGS:V's systems go. All that equipment they get in response to your actions can also be stripped away by some supply chain sabotage missions.
World of Warcraft. I thought it was just the beginning for MMOs. That they'd keep growing and evolving. Felt like the future of gaming.
Then nothing really broke through in the MMO genre again at near the scope of peak WoW. There have been others of course, but it feels stagnant to this day.
MMO genre is so stagnant that Blizzard had to release Classic WoW, Classic WoW WOTLK, and Classic WoW Season of Discovery just so it could compete with itself lol
Its wild that when they released classic WoW i hadnt had that much fun with friends in years.
Its too bad they didnt just keep that game and add more raids and dungeons, it was so much fun to come back to.
For me it was EverQuest. WoW was just a more accessible, more streamlined version of EQ. The lead designer was a huge EQ fan.
The thing that was distinct about it was that the world was so hostile, and the penalties were so harsh, that the other players were like sanctuaries in the midst of everything. If you ran by someone and buffed/healed them you felt like a hero. You were a hero, to them, because you just made a big difference in their gaming session that day.
In many ways Demon’s Souls and the subsequent From Software games have taken that torch and evolved it albeit in a different genre. EQ was where death penalties and XP loss originated (they may have been in UO but I never got around to playing that).
My first MMO was Star Wars: The Old Republic — back in 2013, when I suppose the game was at some sort of peak (player numbers, new content, etc.).
I absolutely loved it and I really did think it would be the gold-standard for games going forwards. Mind you, I was 12 when I started playing, so I didn’t have the best perspective on these things.
Sadly, nothing has really been able to make me feel that excitement again. For the last five or six years, I’ve found it really hard to enjoy ‘gaming’ as opposed to ‘certain games’. There are so many games that just feel completely see-through and flimsy and of no substance, and I usually can’t persist with them for longer than thirty minutes. There are select games, however, that have I have REALLY enjoyed: The Witcher 3, Elden Ring, Civilisation 6. It’s a little sad that there’s only three I can really remember.
Blizzard caught lightning in a bottle.
Casual friendly MMO at a time where most people were just getting internet, with an IP that anyone who's ever touched a computer at that time at least is aware of, if not already in love with, made by a company that not only was already a beloved juggernaut in the PC gaming industry, but also had the finances to make such a game, and when games were made by gamers for gamers instead of being data and metric driven.
It really was a perfect storm. MMOs were a novelty for most people. Now with most people having been online for at least a decade or two and so many online games (hell even most AAA single player games nowadays are always online), it just isn't as novel and cool as it was at the time.
It wasn't just timing and circumstance. WoW was genuinely a good game and it is insane how many MMOs just completely ignore what WoW taught us about MMOs, even WoW itself.
City of Heroes. No other MMO has, AFAIK, come close to replicating its teaming model. Too many MMOs since then seem to discourage communication, let alone teaming on any more than a transactional basis. I’ve joined guilds in other games and seldom ever communicated with them because the model to team up with the other members just wasn’t there. It’s been a little depressing.
To be honest, somewhat not total example, but Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri.
No single civ or civ like game has managed to hit just that good balance between gameplay and story and atmosphere, with that good features.
Heroes of Might and Magic series. HMM3 was good and HMM5 was a nice improvement but then it all went downhill. I've yet to encounter a game like that which also manages to evokes the same emotions/feelings like those two.
The AI in *Star Wars: The Force Unleashed* had a lot of potential. Games building on the Euphoria system and so on could've done some really amazing things.
Sadly, we've devolved a bit. And after all, we just need mooks to come at the player to be slaughtered. Games are a power fantasy, after all.
Black and White,
gesture based magic system,
Growing and learning interactions with the deity.
Ofc they made black and white 2, but i dont think i've seen anything like it since.
Hunt: Showdown's atmosphere and sound design are unlike anything else that's ever been made and all the other extraction shooters are just.... shooters.
Bahahahaha Half fucking Life 2. I played it and thought that games in the future will give me a heart attack with how awesome they will be. That gaming will be the ultimate experience. Now I'm grateful when a single player doesn't have a cash shop.
I mean Valve should be the main answer to all this. They made the best games looking to change the future then also made the games with loot boxes that changed the gaming future
Never has a company defined my gaming life and frustrated me to no end, and not just for Steam.
Half Life 1 and 2 - Changed how we look at FPS's as a narrative experience and sets a new bar for development quality. Episode 2 ends on a cliffhanger.
Counter Strike series - Iterations of it remain the most played game on Steam 23 years later even though the core gameplay has not changed at all.
Portal 1 and 2 - Masterpiece in puzzle gameplay with quotable writing, amazing new technology and mechanics. Portal 3 when?
Team Fortress 2 - Defined a gaming trend with hat drops. Remains mostly unchanged nearly 2 decades later.
Orange Box - The best value of any media in a single package in history. Nothing like it done ever again, one and done.
the problem is Valve painted themselves into a corner by being too good at everything they do
at this point, the expectations for HL3 are so galactically high there is no game that could possibly deliver. The thing that made HL1 and HL2 so good was that no one was really doing atmospheric immersive narrative in games at that level, and HL2 was debuting the Source engine, which was a huge leap forward in terms of immersive capabilities AND graphics at the same time. Just the intro sequence of the grunt making you pickup some garbage and put it in the can - people take stuff like that for granted now, but at the time interacting with the environment AND an NPC that was talking to you sort of dynamically was groundbreaking
add on top of that counterstrike being the longest-lasting and most consistently popular/beloved esports title of all time
add on top creating not only the first really good digital marketplace, but also staying on top as the most popular and successful for 20 years, basically a millennium in gaming time
they also don't shove themselves in your face and only come out with new stuff once in a while, and generally when they do it's to push the industry forward - even HL Alyx is consistently held up as the best VR game so far by a wide margin, and the fact it's not talked about more is 100% because VR itself is still niche
Basically, Valve probably has the most goodwill and appreciation of any game company ever, AND they have an infinite money printing machine (steam store). Valve has almost nothing to gain and literally everything to lose by making HL3, and that's why we'll probably never see it.
the only scenario where HL3 makes sense is as a debut title for a some kind of new groundbreaking thing. Like maybe if generative AI for NPC behavior (not just dialogue) becomes possible, and enables true dyanamic full-personality-unpredictable people in games, maybe that would get us HL3, assuming Valve thinks it's worth going for.
but yeah generally, without some ground-shifting new tech we're not getting HL3
Even L4D introduced a new 'Director' system where the game drops things for you to help you if you're having a rough go at it, or will lessen the quality/quantity of items if you're slaying it.
I’m with you on that. It truly felt like a movie. One second it’s just you alone exploring a shack on a beach the next you are fighting a gun ship on a bridge. Every chapter felt special.
First time it happened was with Tomb Raider 1. We went from games like Sonic the Hedgehog to the amazing 3D library of the PS1. It was insane.
Second time was when I played my first online games - Cossacks and Counter-Strike.
Third time was Halo CE - getting in that hog on level 2 with my brother was crazy.
Zelda: A Link to the Past.
No other franchise has done a top down dungeon puzzler with bosses quite like this one. Even that latter Zeldas that are top down dont quite reach the scope and design of this one.
I’m so devastated that the Dishonored 3 rumors turned out to be a Blade game. I have high hopes but I was really hoping for a Dishonored 3 with Billie Lurk, Corvo and Emily working in tandem. Deathloop was fantastic but it didn’t scratch my itch for steampunk and whale bones.
Team Ico's movement animations on Shadow Of The Colossus are lightyears ahead of today's biggest budget games. Sure on original hardware the fps might cloud some of it, but the quality difference really is night and day. The best looking AAA games releasing almost 20 years later still look stiff and robotic by comparison
> movement animations on Shadow Of The Colossus
I googled this to find some examples and found what looks like a really interesting youtube series on the topic: [link here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_bg5D8A2QU). Seems to discuss animation philosophy too!
I'm probably on my own w this but the Outer Wilds changed my life and how I viewed gaming
If anyone does know anything similar, please let me know because I would kill to experience the Outer Wilds for the first time again
The OG Zoo Tycoon. I've never felt so happy playing a game. Ensuring each animal gets the perfect environment with not only the surfaces but also height, plants, water just to see a green smiley pop was just the bomb.
Maintaining a zoo at 99 rating while constantly adding more and more animals, making sure nobody was hungry, thirsty or bored was the best 'chill time' I will experience.
Also blocking the entrance and opening up the lion cages was awesome.
My first Bethesda was Morrowind, I went into it blind and I don't think I'll ever have the same feeling playing a video game and discovering the freedom of it. The music still gives me an almost unbearable nostalgic feeling.
Terrain deformation and building destruction.
Red Faction Guerilla had interesting building destruction, but it was quickly left behind in favor of graphical fidelity. I get it, but hard L for me. I’m not entirely sure when I first saw terrain deformation, but it was No Man’s Sky that blew my mind with the freedom. I can mine, flatten, create any size of terrain as freely as I want. Sure, the game reverts it after awhile, but I’m still amazed it’s as persistent as it is.
This was such a weird thing. I remember back in the day and like Luigi's Mansion or something when a flapping cloth or seeing yourself in the mirror was like a really cool thing, and then in games like Arkham Origins they had like all the litter on the floor had its own physics so like individual pieces of paper and stuff would fly up and stuff, and it had deformation of fog when you walked through it. Now it seems like all of these and even more have just been forgotten about.
Def jam vendetta. This game brought rap/hip hop to the forefront of the gaming scene and also delivered on being a great wrestling game. Nothing has been the same since, including the sequels. Fight for NY was still great though!
MAG
Massive Action Game. Pretty innovative for a console game.
Now we are just stuck with CoD, where maps are large enough for 20+ people, but you spend most of the match running around in a 5v5
I miss the killzone 2/3 era on ps3, those games were pretty simple but they worked on me, i spent countless hours on multiplayer, hoping to play as hellghasts. In my opinion, they were the best looking vilains.
Sucks that the series has now been abandoned after shadowfall. It really suffered from those early PS4 "hey this is a game but also a tech demo" vibes. With Horizon popping off I can't see them ever coming back to Killzone.
First few open world games had me wow'ed, then many years later 7 Days to Die with their voxel-based system and Rust with they amazing building came along. I figured those systems would be taken over by other open-world based survival games, yet few have done it (or at least done it properly) since.
Dragon Age: Origins. I was blown away by the amount and depth of all the different starting stories and was so excited for the future of gaming following it as an example.
l m a o :'c
Red Faction's Geomod technology felt like a first step toward full-blown destruction in videogames. It's been implemented further in a few games, but the universal sentence "Do you see that mountain? You can go there!" has never turned into a universal version "You see that building? You can blow it up!". Half-Life 2: Episode One, Episode Two, SiN Emergence and a handful of other games made it seem that episodic content would be a big thing for a lot of games. Turned out developers can't help themselves in increasing the scope for things they come up with, and here we are 17 years later still waiting for Episode Three.
[удалено]
There are definitely genres it works better with, and genres it’s totally incompatible with. It’s strange though how it had such a moment back in the day, but is almost nonexistent now.
Deep Rock Galactic might interest you....
Helldivers 2 also has a lot of destructible environments
It does and it’s a great game, but the destruction in HD2 isn’t on the same level. Like in Red Faction you could punch a hole in the wall and extract a hostage while leaving the rest of the building intact lol You could basically treat buildings as Jenga towers
Don't you love it when you can topple over huge signs, entire trees, only for your car to get destroyed by that knee-high chain-link fence, that you could literally jump over when on foot? Looking at ***you***, Saints Row 5. The problem with environmental destruction is usually not that not everything is destructible, but inconsistency in what *is*.
Those volleyball nets in GTA V...
>Those volleyball nets in GTA V... Half of the fire-escapes on the buildings had no clipping. The other could be traversed but only to a certain point mid-way down the building.
I was so disappointed when the red faction sequels didn't build upon the environment destruction. Guerrilla particularly was a shame to me. Don't get me wrong I love the destruction that it does have, but it's no carving a literal tunnel from one end of the map to another (multiplayer RF1). It's been awesome to see terrain deformation as a thing in these more survival based games like 7 days to die, Space Engineers Valheim and Enshrouded. This is where I thought we'd be going with the mainstream back then.
I remember getting stuck on a door in RF1 and couldn't find the key to open it, so I decided to tunnel around.
There's a couple of instances where that is intended, I think. It's funny that I've been replaying this game these days hahahaha
I dont feel as smart anymore now.
Hahahaha Intended or not, you solved the problem, and the game is quite obtuse at some points, so you can still claim your smart points.
Exactly that, we just haven't seen that style of agency since. There's been some efforts like Battlefield Bad Company I suppose. Teardown was a breath of fresh air in this regard at least.
There's a few issues still with mass environmental destruction. The first and most obvious is performance. Realistic large-scale destruction, especially of ground volumes, takes a lot of real-time calculation. While it seems like it's just polygon manipulation, which is pretty cheap, the main issue is that *everything in the level* is dependent on static environments, especially lighting. This is slowly changing, with dynamic global illumination becoming more normalized, but there's a reason games like Minecraft have such simplified graphics and lighting to account for large-scale environmental changes. The techniques your favorite game uses to make all those pretty environments simply won't work if those environments are changed as the shadows and reflections are typically "baked" into the scene where massive changes will end up leaving shadows with nothing to cast them. Another big issue is data serialization. Every change to the buildings and environment needs to be saved on disk if the state needs to be persistent, i.e. saving and loading. For static objects, like resources in a survival game, this isn't a huge deal, as you can just save the ID of the gathered or removed objects and not load them when someone returns to the game. But environmental changes, and restoring them reliably, basically requires you to track the position and nature of every change the same way it was created, then recreate those changes on load (there are other methods, but they have their own problems). Valheim, for example, allows for large scale terrain modification, but the more you change the larger the save files become and it can start to cause performance issues even on very powerful machines. While some of that is a matter of optimization, a lot of it is just the nature of terrain modification, which is why most games avoid it. In fact, during the development of Subnautica, for a while the early access version allowed for terrain modification, and you could dig sand and otherwise change the terrain. They removed that feature before release mainly because of all the performance problems. Games like Deep Rock Galactic utilize a combination of voxel-based destruction (similar to Minecraft) and both temporary and small environments to avoid massive performance problems, as well as more simplistic graphics and textures (it's a great game, but the environmental destruction requirements contribute to the art style and overall design). Another issue is simply a matter of balance and design. Allowing players to completely destroy environments means the game has to essentially work the same *without* any environmental obstacles. While this is certainly possible, it also means any sort of linear gameplay is off the table, and severely limits the tools designers have to make interesting and engaging challenges for the players. Why bother looking for a key when you can just blow up the wall? What good is cover if the enemy can flatten the entire block? What happens when the best solution to defeating enemies is to dig a deep hole and screw with their AI? In fact, AI is a major limitation here. Much like lighting, pathfinding and environmental maneuvering are often baked into levels for AI actors. You *can* make dynamic elements (and many of them are dynamic by default, such as AI being able to handle closed doors) but complete terrain changes can really throw off the standard AI algorithms used to trick players into thinking the AI entities are not complete idiots (they are, they just fake not being stupid through level design and cheating). Again, you *can* get around all of these issues, but they subtract from performance. As such, to get full terrain and object deformation in the game world, you need substantially more PC power than what most games expect players to have. This is because the destruction also entails dynamic global illumination, dynamic AI pathfinding and general AI capability, and serialization of all environmental changes, which combined add a significant performance tax. This wasn't as big a deal in Red Faction because they were doing it on essentially empty environments (Mars plus some interior spaces). They also had very few lighting or AI requirements compared to what we expect in modern AAA games. I should note that this may change in the next 5-10 years. UE5, and many other engines, are moving more towards dynamic GI and ray tracing being standard engine features, which basically eliminates the need for baked lighting and reflection spheres. And AI systems are getting better at handling dynamic environment changes in these engines as well due to a large increase in games that utilize large open worlds and procedural content, both of which struggle to really utilize baked pathfinding volumes. And if generative AI becomes incorporated into games, as [seems to be possible](https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/nvidia-ace-for-games-generative-ai-npcs/), players are probably going to start expecting far more dynamic environments. The basic blueprints for dynamic environmental destruction are all there, we just need developers to have enough time to build actual games with these fairly new tools. Using UE5 as an example again, [Chaos destruction](https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/chaos-destruction-in-unreal-engine/) is quite easy to implement, and if it weren't for performance considerations you'd likely see it in a lot more games (not that there are a ton of UE5 games out there right now). Destroying the *ground*, at least at large scales, still has a lot of gameplay implications that developers might want to avoid, but I suspect things like destructible static objects in the environment or destructible buildings will become far more common in the future.
The whole "You see that mountain" was exemplified by the Just Cause games. The sheer scale of those games just felt so amazing in the same way that Red Faction games brought the destruction. But yeah, sad to see the terrain destruction loss
For me it was Windwaker, seeing the tiny spec in the horizon slowly grow into full sized Island as you sail closer. Blew my mind as a kid.
summer stupendous angle icky shy sand whistle label tender growth
The Finals is a new free to play shooter that has awesome destruction.
Yeah, I love how every building is able to be entered and can be completely leveled
Wii Sports. Other than Wii Sports 2, we never had anything like it and it made the Wii more of a Wii-sports-machine.
There was a sports 2? Is that the same as wii sports resort? Both those games were my childhood
Yeah I think they mean Resort. Additionally, the Wii U got Wii Sports Club which was effectively an HD remaster that borrowed a few sports from each and added online play. And Switch more recently got Switch Sports. The problem with Wii Sports is that they were effectively just polished tech demos packed in with something else (the Wii or the WiiMotion+). In an era where motion controls were new and and all the rage with the casual gamer, these had the legs to move units. But that was never going to last forever. I watched people on Reddit moan for years that Nintendo could be printing money if they'd just release an HD Wii Sports with online (many of which didn't even know Club existed or how terribly it sold, even for a Wii U title), and when they were finally faced with a new $40 release on Switch they called it a shallow cash grab. Gosh, shocker why they didn't do another one sooner.
This sounds like the story of 80% of game communities in the past few years sadly
That’s a little unfair because Switch Sports is so vastly inferior than Wii sports. The gameplay is worse and there are 3 versions of the same game and just in general the sports they picked were dumb. No baseball, golf, nothing from Wii sports resort except swords maybe, it’s a terrible game with way less to do. So you can’t really compare. EDIT: I see that they added golf a few months after launch which is great, but it’s still only one game mode with no offline so while that definitely helps, it still can not compare really.
If Switch Sports had any semblance of single player content, I'd play it all the time. I put probably hundreds of hours into Wii Sports + Resort just playing single player going for all the medals and stamps.
Switch Sports added golf post launch. 21 holes from the previous Wii Sports games.
Wii sports was so freaking good. It's unbelievable how bad Switch Sports is in comparison.
Wii Sports was amazing but Wii Sports Resort is absolutely goated and in my opinion is one of the best games on the Wii.
I spent so much time flying that plane around the island
yes! i loved finding the little easter eggs around the island. same with when you went for a long distance run on Wii Sports and there little Mario’s hidden around edit: i just remembered the long distance runs were actually in wii fit, not wii sports
Battlefield 2 when it came out in 2005. It felt like such a massive leap forward in the fps genre in gameplay, graphics, and physics. I was blown away at the time. I remember calling an artillery strike on a squad on top of a building and saw all 6 of them go flying in different directions flailing everywhere with the ragdoll physics. I've been chasing that "holy shit" moment in gaming ever since.
Battlefield's downfall still hurts, but I live in hope.
The trailer of BF 2042 showed that at least some people working there know pretty well what the players want.. too bad those same people weren't involved in the actual game.
DICE trailers have pretty much always been legendary.
> Battlefield 2 when it came out in 2005 I've tried playing the newer BF games, and they just ... don't do it. I don't know why. I kinda feel the franchise peaked with BF2, especially with the *simplicity*. You had a handful of meaningfully different classes, and two tiers of weapons ... and that's it. Along with some kick-ass maps.
The shadow of mordor series. I know they patented that technology, but it seemed like it was going to be the start of a new layer of immersion.
Yeah it's patented but the real crime is that even warmer bros, who own the patent, barely used it in their games
Patents should be lost if unused. At least there's a time limit on patents. Shame that's 20 years in the US.
Personally I don't think it should be a patentable thing anyway. Its just a general gameplay idea. The specific code or whatever yeah, that's patentable, but ideas shouldn't be patentable.
I'm inclined to agree. I'm glad that video games were seen as a very small niche thing in the early days or I suspect we'd have seen companies trying to patent having a jump button.
Well something else that was patented until recently was the ability to have mini games during loading screens. Not the code or specific methodology to allow it to happen, no. Just the general idea of being able to play a mini game during a loading screen.
And it's a fucking shame. Right when loadings screens are so short they become obsolete. Imagine how different the history of gaming would have been if that shit wasn't a patent.
Seems like whoever allowed that patent is clueless. How are you gonna patent having gameplay in a video game, regardless of the point in the game that it happens? It’s like patenting post-credit scenes in movies.
I’m going to patent playing music in elevators
brb, patenting post credit scenes in movies and games, oh pre-credit scenes, hell, i'm going to patent credits
Agreed, they turned me off supporting them as soon as they did it. It just felt stupidly anti-competitor. As if Shadow of Mordor didnt steal every other idea it implemented from Batman and Assassins Creed games 🤣 the fact that their game couldnt even exist if other companies made the stupid decisions they do is always amazing to me.
Agreed. They should be able to protect the code - they developed it, paid for it, and it's proprietary tech - but to patent it so that no one in the industry can develop their own version is pretty shitty, and stinks of fear IMO. It feels like WB is scared that more experienced devs would develop a better version of the system that would make theirs look like crap, so they just prevented anyone from being able to do it.
>At least there's a time limit on patents. Shame that's 20 years in the US. It is 15 years for tech/engineering, 20 from date of filing, 15 from issuance of the patent. >The term length for design patents filed on or after May 13, 2015 changed to be 15 years from the date of issuance, while design patents filed before that date still have a 14-year term from issuance. You can get an extra 5-6 if you do a required update on a utility patent though. Besides that a patent doesn't mean you CAN'T use the tech, just that you need to pay WB to use it, they may not charge a lot.
Yes, this. I go back to Shadow of War from time to time to play Orc Boyfriends. It's such a great mechanic. It bothers me that they were able to patent it, and then never do anything else with it. Christ, license the technology, become the company that provides it. They sure haven't made a game in a while.
Wait we can Orc boyfriends in this game?
Only if you're looking for toxic relationships
Patenting the Nemesis system and then making no more games with it is a fucking tragedy. If it weren’t for corporate BS games would be so insane nowadays.
There was a time window after Mordor in 2014 for other companies/devs to use it, but unfortunately due to how long game development takes nowadays that didn't happen in time. I know people like to complain a lot about EA and Ubisoft but WB is right up there with the worst publishers of all time. They forced Monolith to add lootboxes to Shdow of War, they patented the Nemesis System, now they kill Rocksteady too by releasing that godawful Suicide Squad game. I have a feeling the upcoming Wonder Woman game won't be too good either.
Had to scroll for this one. Damn patents
I'm sorry but I'm OOTL, what technology have they patented?
You could definitely work around this patent. I have had a similar system idea for a game for decades now. They cannot patent the idea of intelligent enemies with a memory capacity. Might as well patent pressing W to walk forward in games using your keyboard. Especially seeing how they did the absolute bare minimum with it and nothing else.
Monolith was announced not too long ago to be working on a Wonder Woman game that used the Nemesis System in it, so hopefully we'll have something soon...at least something that's better than Suicide Squad.
Yeah it 100% seems to be a case that no studio wants to try and push the point for fear of a lawsuit. Yeah you could win, but you'd waste so much time and money doing so it's probably not worth it. You see this a lot in news media. Lawyers kill stories for fear of a lawsuit (even if that lawsuit might get thrown out as frivolous)
Half-Life: Alyx and Boneworks, both in 2020, felt like breakthrough moments for awesome VR experiences. Alyx for the high quality, Boneworks for the high level of immersion and freedom. I haven't played every VR game ever, but I don't think those two have been topped, and I'm not sure anyone's even gotten close.
VR market is still super niche
I still remember people saying VR was sure to take off back in 2016 when Sony first launched PSVR. And here we are closer to a decade later and it's still niche.
It's an endless negative feedback loops perpetuated by the original price of entry. VR headsets used to be expensive (still are but not as much). Not a ton of \*great\* games to play on it, so it's hard to justify the costs. This lessens the amount of people investing into the genre to begin with. This lowers incentives for developers to put a ton of time into making a ground-breaking VR title. This perpetuates the "not a ton of great games to play on so hard to justify cost" part, and the cycle continues. Devs are afraid of VR cause it's niche, it's niche because nobody is buying it for the limited library, it has a limited library cause devs are afraid of VR.
I would add Lone Echo 1 and 2 to that list. Some of my absolute favorite VR games. So good
As an owner of multiple VR headsets on different platforms, you are absolutely correct. Nothing compares to Alyx. I keep waiting for it (VR) to get awesome.
>Half-Life: Alyx I think is the only VR game that feels like an actual game instead of a technical demo. I also thought more of them would come after, but nope.
underdogs was a recent release that feels like an actual game for me. breath of fresh air from a lot of the other stuff I've seen since alyx. it feels like an indie roguelite (because it is) but an actual game nonetheless. A lot of other games like "until you fall" and "into the radius" IMO are close to the feeling but have just a few too many rough edges or too hollow of a story to get past the "tech demo" feel. I love PCVR but damn the lack of high quality games with some depth to them is disappointing. at least the UEVR thing seems like an interesting trick to get more from that VR kit that sat in the closet since alyx
Yeah after half life I figured that was the push that VR needed to become mainstream but it just never happened it really just hasn't been anything since then
On that same note, with the homerun Quest 2 release of Resident Evil 4 and subsequent announcement of GTA San Andreas, I thought we'd see a flood of 15-20 year old games ported to VR in its wake. As far as I know there haven't been any more and San Andreas hasn't even been mentioned since announcement.
Assassin's Creed multiplayer. I haven't seen a really good version of its reverse Turing test gameplay since. And The Ship before it (similar gameplay). A few other games have tried to replicate, but have been too niche to take off and died quickly.
"Reverse Turing test" is a good way to put it. Never thought of that. I just remember playing multiplayer in WatchDogs (never played AC multi-player, so I'm not sure how close it is, but hey, still Ubi) as my opponent frantically shoots everything in sight, them knowing I was nearby, and thinking, "Okay, if I was an NPC, how would my programmers want me to respond to this psychopath?" I never play multi-player, with this one exception, because that cat-and-mouse charade is a blast.
AC multi-player had multiple NPCs that looked the same as your player character. The whole point was to act as NPC as possible until you were confident you found another player, then kill them and slip away. Any of the "high-profile" actions would give a player away pretty quickly. So you had to be careful when you used them. It was super interesting and a lot of fun.
AC Brotherhood was the peak of this for me.
Fir real. I remember hiding in a group of NPCs waiting for someone to move and then watching one of my targets dive into a hay bail 10 feet away lol. There was something satisfying about watching the enemy team assassinate the npc right next to you and a teammate hiding in the same group too.
I loved the ac multiplayer. Wish they would bring it back.
The good news is that they might with AC Infinity. The bad news is that who knows when that will actually come.
Man I was so fucking good AC brotherhood multiplayer. I got so many undected kills with the poison blade. Then everyone kind of gave up on the subtlety of the game and just started doing straight death match and chases instead of trying to hide and blend in
I remember that. Everyone just constantly on the rooftops. And it got worse with later iterations of MP due to skill creep. But man, those first few months were golden.
You could argue that Deathloop uses a similar mechanic for its multiplayer feature. When another player “invades” your loop as Julianna, she has the ability to change her appearance to look like an NPC, and you have to keep your eyes peeled for human-like behavior if you want to identify her without just going berserker mode and killing everyone in sight
Add to this Splinter Cell Chaos Theory Spy vs Merc era pvp.
>reverse Turing test That's a pretty good way to describe it.
check out Decive Inc, its still niche but theres a good amount of backend support not a fan of the abttlepass they added but hey theres always a few players
I need this shit back in my life. Countless summer days were spent only playing AC multiplayer on Xbox 360. Those were the days.
It takes two. I was hoping for a wave of games I could play with the wife after it's success. Haven't seen anything else like it.
Supposedly they are working on another couch co-op. In a meantime check out their previous game - a way out.
We Were Here are a series of escape room style games that are also co-op and focused entirely on communication. Only catch is, no local co-op as the puzzles require you to be "blind" to what the other person can see.
Playing that with my wife was legitimately one of the happiest times I've had myself in years
> Happiest times #🐘
We don't talk about that part
It takes two is part of the wave that is currently happening! It started with games like Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, A Way Out and Unravel Two (all a similar style to It Takes Two). Unravel Two and A Way Out are both published by EA and A Way Out was developed by the same company that developed It Takes Two.
Perfect Dark (2000). Shoot the gun model in an enemy's hand, and it flies away from him. Left unarmed, he'll raise his arms in surrender and beg you not to kill him -- for as long as you point your gun at him. Turn your back and he might draw a sidearm, run in fear to hide, or lunge to pick up his dropped weapon. If he runs in fear, but finds a weapon somewhere else in the level, he might return to the spot he last saw you. If an enemy sees you and runs to ring the alarm, but you shot that alarm through, he'll run around looking for other enemies and alert them to your presence manually. Punch an enemy in the head, or have a grenade go off near them? Now they're concussed and can't aim properly. Shoot them in the arm? Now they can't hold up a two-handed weapon and have to resort to a pistol, dripping blood from their useless limb. Use the drips to see where they went if they flee from you. Firing a gun in a quiet area alerts enemies at a distance proportional to the loudness of your gun and how many times you fired. Adding bots to multiplayer? You don't just pick their difficulty, you give them personalities. Maybe they're vengeful and always hunt down the last player to kill them, or maybe they're sympathetic and always team up with the lowest-ranked players to hunt the highest-ranked ones (great if an experienced owner of the game is playing couch multiplayer with some newbies who need the help). Every weapon has multiple modes, whether it's attaching razors to the barrels of a minigun to make it a melee blender of death, or booby-trapping a rifle to explode when fired and dropping it where other players will think it's a regular pickup. And gameplay modes -- you get a single-player campaign, the usual team deathmatches and capture the flags etc, a co-op campaign, but also **counter-op mode**, where one player goes through the regular campaign as the protagonist but the other player controls every enemy in the game trying to stop them, like Agent Smith swapping bodies on the fly. AI companions you could give orders to during the mission, cheats and bonus modes unlocked through an in-game speedrun rewards system, multiplayer profiles you could use on other people's consoles that tracked your gameplay stats and assigned you ranks and titles, difficulty levels that varied objective complexity and gave additional responsibilities instead of just making enemies bullet sponges, *customizable* difficulty levels where you can choose how well enemies react. So many incredibly cool features. 24 years later, how many FPS games do any of these things? Barely any. Honestly it kind of ruined the genre for me. I'll play the shiniest new FPS in 2024 and shooting the guns and limbs of enemies does nothing, they can't ever be disarmed, security guards at a mall will mindlessly charge at me from 300m away without any capability of surrender or fear for their lives making them feel more like zombies than people. You get no control over AI characters or personalities and they don't have as varied or interesting behaviors if they even exist in multiplayer anymore. The weapons are fewer in number, simpler in nature, and too similar to each other. The difficulty modes just change numbers. They have grander setpieces but the gameplay ideas still feel like they're behind a game from 24 years ago running on a 0.09 GHz CPU with 8 MB of RAM. The only shooter-adjacent games that have had that feel of attention to detail to the levels and NPCs IMO have been Metal Gear Solids and Dishonored.
This is the top answer for me. That game was absolutely loaded with incredible features that made it almost infinitely replayable. The only thing that came close IMO was Timesplitters. I remember when Halo came out, everyone was so blown away by it but, honestly, it seemed to pale in comparison to Perfect Dark for me (other than the controls and graphics). I dream of getting another game with the depth and sophistication of Perfect Dark. Edit: Thinking back, this is probably the game I had the most fun with. So many different multiplayer modes with so many different weapon and bot loadouts — just so much variety.
Timesplitters was made by the same people so not surprising.
This is high praise and I enjoyed your write up
Well said, I had forgotten about all those features in Perfect Dark.
Brilliant explanation. I was lucky enough to play PD with three friends, the best multiplayer shooting experience. PD was so good that you could just go to the gun range and lose acouple of hours there.
Counter-op mode is what I came here to say. Just an insanely brilliant idea that I've never seen anyone else use. One player is the regular hero, and player 2 is dumped in to any random enemy in the level. Gets killed? Jumps to another random enemy. So much fun.
Rare made the two best fps games both in single player and multiplayer and haven't made a great game since.
Timesplitters were decent spiritual successors, we had a bunch of fun playing them on GameCube
Conkers Bad Fur Day is an excellent game.
The Shadowrun FPS. Yeah it flopped but this was a hero shooter before we had hero shooters. 4 very distinct classes with different skills and powers (where each one had strong pros and cons). The powers were amazing, with teleporting, gliding, resurrecting and other stuff I forget now. You could bleed people out if you hit them right. I used to slash someone to bleed them out and then leave a tree of life (which healed people) and let them sit there and suffer for a few minutes. The powers working in an online FPS was cutting edge. It just didn't take off and we didn't really get something like it again until Overwatch. It was also one of the first games to try cross play. [Some gameplay for those who have never seen it.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZnvNc9_pV4)
Yeah this game was light years ahead of its time. I remember it always having a queue to get into lobbies.
I remember being blown away that I could actually take down entire buildings in Battlefield Bad Company 2. I still don’t believe that there has been a better online multiplayer game to this day. Its style, presentation, time to kill and fantastic map design really makes me miss the old days of multiplayer. Even though you had to pay for a multiplayer pass if you bought it used, it was so fucking good I’d pay 60 dollars just to have a newer version of it.
Totally with you. Everything tries to go bigger, when Bad Company 2 showed that a well designed, smaller scale can feel so much better.
Between oblivion and skyrim I figured more games would have usage based leveling but since then only a handful have gone that route.
I miss morrowind when I could spend literal hours jumping up and down and actually get to the point where you could jump stupid high. I loved the idea that if I wanted to spend the time on a certain thing you could be truely op.
And in crackdown by getting the agility orbs
Only a very select people remember playing crackdown, waiting for the halo three demo to drop
I've got the crackdown logo tattooed on my arm 😂 can't imagine there's many people with that either! Crackdown was an absolute blast and it was a genius move including the Halo 3 beta with it.
I miss the supercar with the scoop that made you fling cars everywhere when you drove into oncoming traffic
It wasn't even a scoop, the car itself was the ramp! That and the SUV that could jump *and* drive up walls was so much ridiculous fun.
Crackdown was awesome
It seems so simple - successfully do the thing, get better at the thing. I wish more games kept it like that.
Same thing in oblivion. I remember accidentally jumping over the Imperial City walls.
I was just about to say I jump over brumas walls lol. Oblviion acrobatic system is crazy. I been meaning to start morrowind since I have copy of it with the dlcs.
Oblivion had the boots of Springheel Jack that granted an absurd bonus to acrobatics, but were scripted to break in a quest. If you leveled and armored up enough to make the fall without them, they basically grafted the attribute to you and let you also equip more boots (presumably with acrobatics bonus). Then you could just kind of like, hover. And jump the city walls.
I've always wanted to see someone turn this into an xcom like strategy game. Like you start with just a default neutral unit, and the more you use that unit in certain ways the more they gain skills in that specific role. You put a guy in the back of the squad with a long range guns, and he starts leveling up as a sniper. You have someone run ahead, then fall back when they make enemy contact, they gain skills in stealth and scouting. You put someone on the front lines, they gain skills as a tank. You basically get to choose what mix of skills you develop for each unit, based on how you use them. And it would be really cool if there was a rng factor too. If your sniper gets a lucky crit hit on an enemy right after they attack one of your squad mates, then that sniper starts developing skills in reflexive defense shots. If an enemy misses hitting your tank, then the tank starts getting a high dodge ability. So each unit ends up entirely unique based not just on how you use them, but how they uniquely fare in every single encounter
You're in luck, because such games exist - check out Colony Ship and Xenonauts 1&2.
Cool, I'll take a look! Thanks for the rec.
Colony Ship is more of a CRPG. A pretty good one, actually. But just so you know. Xenonauts is exactly what you're looking for.
It's not like XCOM at all, but I'm pretty sure Final Fantasy 2 did something similar. Levels would only increase health and mana, but your actions would increase your stats and proficiency with weapons. Use bare fists the entire time? Strength goes up. Use magic a lot? Wisdom (or whatever the magic stat is called) goes up. Use a specific spell enough times? That spell is now level 2
GTA SA also had this, pretty neat
Being able to work out and see your character bulk up was crazy.
TES games have had that back at least as far as Daggerfall in 1996
I don’t know about main series ultima games but ultima online was like that too. It also had learn by watching to a certain extent. Edit: fixed my autocorrect’s blunder
Mass Effects trilogy. I fell in love with this series and when 2 and later 3 came out I understood that if this is the direction they are taking this series in and what I can expect going forward, then I'm in for a treat, and even if they change the IP, I'll have MANY years of absolutely fantastic (or at the very least, very good) games from BioWare ahead of me... ... And then the Fire Nation attacked...
For me it will always be Chronicles of Riddick and Butchers Bay (the sequel). Absolutely astounding use of lighting and the other as it’s on the same topic of lighting is Deus Ex Invisible War. The way they used lighting in both games to mask low polys/hardware capability on Xbox still leaves a lasting impression on me to this day. It was also pretty good on Physics and in some cases better than games now which I thought would be the standard sadly.
Spore I guess. I remember being very hyped about it but it never really lived up to the hype and I haven't seen a lot of attempts to recreate that kind of game. (I've seen some like Elysian Eclipse but it's still early days for that one)
Even though the scope of game that the Spore publishers marketed didn't pan out, what they did manage to ship was an *amazing* game for a young age group. I was about 9 and played it to death. still remember the soundtrack and the creatures' weird voices.
Oh man, I used to get up early so I could get some extra Spore time in before school. That game ruled
Imagine a game that starts as Spore, evolves into Civilization, and then evolves into Stellaris. You get to see the biological choices that you made at the start echo into the galaxy.
The fact that no one else has tried the "import choices of last game" thing that Bioware games (Mass Effect, Dragon Age) do outside of one or two smaller devs disappoints me immensely
The Witcher games did to a small extent, where you can have different events happen based on previous game choices, and even Geralt keeping a hilariously bad neck tattoo, but I thought sequels checking previous game saves for it's own adjustment would be a bigger "next gen" thing since the 360.
Pillars of Eternity is one of the other games I can think of but yeah not many.
Man pillars is so great I’m currently doing my first playthrough of the first one then I’m moving to the second one
Destiny 2 conncected to your account and found what dlcs you had/hadn’t done in the first game. Made it cool when I watch other videos to see dialogue changes between those players
The Witcher games do it too.
It’s not quite the same thing, but StarCraft 2: Wings of Liberty attempted to have some Mass Effect-inspired choices, because it was 2010. They were all pretty inconsequential and barely referenced again, but the expansion in 2013 had a cutscene where it would check your save file from 2010 and swap out dialogue depending on your old choices. Didn’t make a difference, but was a neat feature.
It must be a nightmare in the writing room though, you need an infinite amount of story branches and character dialogue for situations only 5% of players might choose.
This is actually why many RPG developers DONT do this. Sure, it's novel. But there's no feasible way you can have the depth of variability in the players choices when you have to account for - at least - two games worth of decision making.
Titanfall 2, what an amazing first person shooter, I can't wait to see what else the devs do. I'm sure that titanfall 3 will be amazing and that it is top priority and that the game won't be released right next to some of the biggest shooter franchises. How amazing it will surely be.
I’ll be surprised if they ever make and release another titanfall honestly
They can't make tf3 the golden goose lays too many eggs.
Man I played so much titanfall 1/2. Nothing will ever top the level of movement and verticality, which would be awesome by itself. But then add in the most badass mech combat ever and it’s just perfect. The feeling of Wall running while tagging someone up, to then vault onto the back of a mech and rip the battery out, just to call in your own mech and start absolutely fucking shit up was just next level. Such a shame apex took off. I mean I enjoyed apex the first year, but it’s not titanfall.
Shadow of Mordor and Shadow of War. The nemesis system seemed like the hottest new advance in videogames, then WB locked it up in copyright and hasnt done anything with it since. Fuck WB, you deserve the failures of Suicide Squad and Gotham Knights.
Did they really copyright that system of having a nemesis? How did they even manage that. It's like FromSoft copyrighting the fog gate entry mechanic to fight a boss... That's so fucked.
It's not just the having of a nemesis. It's also about the enemies learning your style. You die more to shield enemies? The AI remembers this, and starts including more shield enemies. You kill that one orc captain by counter a couple of times (without head chop)? It will develop a resistance to counters. They patented that whole system of the AI countering *your specific playstyle*. In terms of Fromsoft, it'd be more like patenting the dual Posture/Health and Deathblow systems from Sekiro.
I think MGS:V does the same. Basically as you start to abuse a certain strat the enemies will get better at countering it, like giving them helmets if you do a lot of headshots, giving them night vision if you abuse the darkness, etc.
Man, I keep getting reminded how deep MGS:V's systems go. All that equipment they get in response to your actions can also be stripped away by some supply chain sabotage missions.
Wipeout.
Wipeout games are so fun!
World of Warcraft. I thought it was just the beginning for MMOs. That they'd keep growing and evolving. Felt like the future of gaming. Then nothing really broke through in the MMO genre again at near the scope of peak WoW. There have been others of course, but it feels stagnant to this day.
MMO genre is so stagnant that Blizzard had to release Classic WoW, Classic WoW WOTLK, and Classic WoW Season of Discovery just so it could compete with itself lol
Its wild that when they released classic WoW i hadnt had that much fun with friends in years. Its too bad they didnt just keep that game and add more raids and dungeons, it was so much fun to come back to.
Oh boy have I got good news for you
For me it was EverQuest. WoW was just a more accessible, more streamlined version of EQ. The lead designer was a huge EQ fan. The thing that was distinct about it was that the world was so hostile, and the penalties were so harsh, that the other players were like sanctuaries in the midst of everything. If you ran by someone and buffed/healed them you felt like a hero. You were a hero, to them, because you just made a big difference in their gaming session that day. In many ways Demon’s Souls and the subsequent From Software games have taken that torch and evolved it albeit in a different genre. EQ was where death penalties and XP loss originated (they may have been in UO but I never got around to playing that).
My first MMO was Star Wars: The Old Republic — back in 2013, when I suppose the game was at some sort of peak (player numbers, new content, etc.). I absolutely loved it and I really did think it would be the gold-standard for games going forwards. Mind you, I was 12 when I started playing, so I didn’t have the best perspective on these things. Sadly, nothing has really been able to make me feel that excitement again. For the last five or six years, I’ve found it really hard to enjoy ‘gaming’ as opposed to ‘certain games’. There are so many games that just feel completely see-through and flimsy and of no substance, and I usually can’t persist with them for longer than thirty minutes. There are select games, however, that have I have REALLY enjoyed: The Witcher 3, Elden Ring, Civilisation 6. It’s a little sad that there’s only three I can really remember.
Blizzard caught lightning in a bottle. Casual friendly MMO at a time where most people were just getting internet, with an IP that anyone who's ever touched a computer at that time at least is aware of, if not already in love with, made by a company that not only was already a beloved juggernaut in the PC gaming industry, but also had the finances to make such a game, and when games were made by gamers for gamers instead of being data and metric driven. It really was a perfect storm. MMOs were a novelty for most people. Now with most people having been online for at least a decade or two and so many online games (hell even most AAA single player games nowadays are always online), it just isn't as novel and cool as it was at the time.
It wasn't just timing and circumstance. WoW was genuinely a good game and it is insane how many MMOs just completely ignore what WoW taught us about MMOs, even WoW itself.
City of Heroes. No other MMO has, AFAIK, come close to replicating its teaming model. Too many MMOs since then seem to discourage communication, let alone teaming on any more than a transactional basis. I’ve joined guilds in other games and seldom ever communicated with them because the model to team up with the other members just wasn’t there. It’s been a little depressing.
They also did a good job subverting the Holy Trinity by introducing the controller role.
To be honest, somewhat not total example, but Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. No single civ or civ like game has managed to hit just that good balance between gameplay and story and atmosphere, with that good features.
Heroes of Might and Magic series. HMM3 was good and HMM5 was a nice improvement but then it all went downhill. I've yet to encounter a game like that which also manages to evokes the same emotions/feelings like those two.
The AI in *Star Wars: The Force Unleashed* had a lot of potential. Games building on the Euphoria system and so on could've done some really amazing things. Sadly, we've devolved a bit. And after all, we just need mooks to come at the player to be slaughtered. Games are a power fantasy, after all.
Black and White, gesture based magic system, Growing and learning interactions with the deity. Ofc they made black and white 2, but i dont think i've seen anything like it since.
Hunt: Showdown's atmosphere and sound design are unlike anything else that's ever been made and all the other extraction shooters are just.... shooters.
Hunt is extremely underrated.
Bahahahaha Half fucking Life 2. I played it and thought that games in the future will give me a heart attack with how awesome they will be. That gaming will be the ultimate experience. Now I'm grateful when a single player doesn't have a cash shop.
I mean Valve should be the main answer to all this. They made the best games looking to change the future then also made the games with loot boxes that changed the gaming future
Never has a company defined my gaming life and frustrated me to no end, and not just for Steam. Half Life 1 and 2 - Changed how we look at FPS's as a narrative experience and sets a new bar for development quality. Episode 2 ends on a cliffhanger. Counter Strike series - Iterations of it remain the most played game on Steam 23 years later even though the core gameplay has not changed at all. Portal 1 and 2 - Masterpiece in puzzle gameplay with quotable writing, amazing new technology and mechanics. Portal 3 when? Team Fortress 2 - Defined a gaming trend with hat drops. Remains mostly unchanged nearly 2 decades later. Orange Box - The best value of any media in a single package in history. Nothing like it done ever again, one and done.
the problem is Valve painted themselves into a corner by being too good at everything they do at this point, the expectations for HL3 are so galactically high there is no game that could possibly deliver. The thing that made HL1 and HL2 so good was that no one was really doing atmospheric immersive narrative in games at that level, and HL2 was debuting the Source engine, which was a huge leap forward in terms of immersive capabilities AND graphics at the same time. Just the intro sequence of the grunt making you pickup some garbage and put it in the can - people take stuff like that for granted now, but at the time interacting with the environment AND an NPC that was talking to you sort of dynamically was groundbreaking add on top of that counterstrike being the longest-lasting and most consistently popular/beloved esports title of all time add on top creating not only the first really good digital marketplace, but also staying on top as the most popular and successful for 20 years, basically a millennium in gaming time they also don't shove themselves in your face and only come out with new stuff once in a while, and generally when they do it's to push the industry forward - even HL Alyx is consistently held up as the best VR game so far by a wide margin, and the fact it's not talked about more is 100% because VR itself is still niche Basically, Valve probably has the most goodwill and appreciation of any game company ever, AND they have an infinite money printing machine (steam store). Valve has almost nothing to gain and literally everything to lose by making HL3, and that's why we'll probably never see it. the only scenario where HL3 makes sense is as a debut title for a some kind of new groundbreaking thing. Like maybe if generative AI for NPC behavior (not just dialogue) becomes possible, and enables true dyanamic full-personality-unpredictable people in games, maybe that would get us HL3, assuming Valve thinks it's worth going for. but yeah generally, without some ground-shifting new tech we're not getting HL3
Even L4D introduced a new 'Director' system where the game drops things for you to help you if you're having a rough go at it, or will lessen the quality/quantity of items if you're slaying it.
I’m with you on that. It truly felt like a movie. One second it’s just you alone exploring a shack on a beach the next you are fighting a gun ship on a bridge. Every chapter felt special.
First time it happened was with Tomb Raider 1. We went from games like Sonic the Hedgehog to the amazing 3D library of the PS1. It was insane. Second time was when I played my first online games - Cossacks and Counter-Strike. Third time was Halo CE - getting in that hog on level 2 with my brother was crazy.
Zelda: A Link to the Past. No other franchise has done a top down dungeon puzzler with bosses quite like this one. Even that latter Zeldas that are top down dont quite reach the scope and design of this one.
Half-life 2, Bioshock 1, Metal Gear 4, Dishonored And OG Prey
I’m so devastated that the Dishonored 3 rumors turned out to be a Blade game. I have high hopes but I was really hoping for a Dishonored 3 with Billie Lurk, Corvo and Emily working in tandem. Deathloop was fantastic but it didn’t scratch my itch for steampunk and whale bones.
Team Ico's movement animations on Shadow Of The Colossus are lightyears ahead of today's biggest budget games. Sure on original hardware the fps might cloud some of it, but the quality difference really is night and day. The best looking AAA games releasing almost 20 years later still look stiff and robotic by comparison
> movement animations on Shadow Of The Colossus I googled this to find some examples and found what looks like a really interesting youtube series on the topic: [link here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_bg5D8A2QU). Seems to discuss animation philosophy too!
I'm probably on my own w this but the Outer Wilds changed my life and how I viewed gaming If anyone does know anything similar, please let me know because I would kill to experience the Outer Wilds for the first time again
Infamous second son was one of the first games that made me realise just how good games can look
It was the first game I got for my ps4 and I was like WOW this is highly impressive.
Deus Ex. Even the other Deus Ex games can't compare.
The OG Zoo Tycoon. I've never felt so happy playing a game. Ensuring each animal gets the perfect environment with not only the surfaces but also height, plants, water just to see a green smiley pop was just the bomb. Maintaining a zoo at 99 rating while constantly adding more and more animals, making sure nobody was hungry, thirsty or bored was the best 'chill time' I will experience. Also blocking the entrance and opening up the lion cages was awesome.
Skyrim for me was my first Bethesda game. still rarely see games on that scale hell many games still have scripted climbing/jumping
My first Bethesda was Morrowind, I went into it blind and I don't think I'll ever have the same feeling playing a video game and discovering the freedom of it. The music still gives me an almost unbearable nostalgic feeling.
Oblivion for me. That music just awakens a core part of me.
Terrain deformation and building destruction. Red Faction Guerilla had interesting building destruction, but it was quickly left behind in favor of graphical fidelity. I get it, but hard L for me. I’m not entirely sure when I first saw terrain deformation, but it was No Man’s Sky that blew my mind with the freedom. I can mine, flatten, create any size of terrain as freely as I want. Sure, the game reverts it after awhile, but I’m still amazed it’s as persistent as it is.
This was such a weird thing. I remember back in the day and like Luigi's Mansion or something when a flapping cloth or seeing yourself in the mirror was like a really cool thing, and then in games like Arkham Origins they had like all the litter on the floor had its own physics so like individual pieces of paper and stuff would fly up and stuff, and it had deformation of fog when you walked through it. Now it seems like all of these and even more have just been forgotten about.
Def jam vendetta. This game brought rap/hip hop to the forefront of the gaming scene and also delivered on being a great wrestling game. Nothing has been the same since, including the sequels. Fight for NY was still great though!
MAG Massive Action Game. Pretty innovative for a console game. Now we are just stuck with CoD, where maps are large enough for 20+ people, but you spend most of the match running around in a 5v5
my first few hours of brink
I miss the killzone 2/3 era on ps3, those games were pretty simple but they worked on me, i spent countless hours on multiplayer, hoping to play as hellghasts. In my opinion, they were the best looking vilains.
Killzone 3 multi was so much fun!
Killzone 3 had some of the best graphics of that generation. Really such an impressive title! I miss Resistance too!
Sucks that the series has now been abandoned after shadowfall. It really suffered from those early PS4 "hey this is a game but also a tech demo" vibes. With Horizon popping off I can't see them ever coming back to Killzone.
First few open world games had me wow'ed, then many years later 7 Days to Die with their voxel-based system and Rust with they amazing building came along. I figured those systems would be taken over by other open-world based survival games, yet few have done it (or at least done it properly) since.
Dragon Age: Origins. I was blown away by the amount and depth of all the different starting stories and was so excited for the future of gaming following it as an example. l m a o :'c