I was recently discussing Farcry 2 with some friends and how cool the fire spread system was - And how it essentially was never used again after that title.
Is there a cool feature or mechanic you’ve seen in a game and hope to see more of?
Mods and self hosted servers
This seems fairly common among the survival games genre.
mind sharing a few titles?
I stopped looking into much new stuff beyond word of mouth, last I played was Neither, I think, and it was very disappointing that that didn’t go anywhere. neat that you can still run a server, though
V-Rising, Valheim, No Man’s Sky, Palworld, Enshrouded, Conan Exiles.
Minecraft is probably the quintessential survival game and has a significant modding community.
Minecraft is one of the only constants in my life lol
Fun fact: some mechanics never came back cause they got copyrighted and the studio with the copyright went “no, we’re not doing that kind of game anymore” and as soon as anyone goes “okay, can we try?” they sue them into oblivion for copyright infringement
You mean patent. You don’t choose to copyright things or not, all media is inherently copyrighted. This comment is technically copyrighted once I hit send. It sounds like your referring to Shadow of Mordor’s/War’s Nemesis system being patented.
Potato Pohtato
Copyright infringement, trademark infringement, and patent infringement are all very different.
Cool, but the difference doesn’t matter for this context, the result is the same
The difference does matter. Two copyrighted games can have similar mechanics. Just look at literally any pair of games in the same genre. First person shooting isn’t patented, so anybody can make an FPS game. They patented the nemesis system. Shadow of Mordor and Shadow of War are copyrighted.
Cool. The result is the same.
To put it simply. I do not care
It’s a common misconception. It’s not a big deal. Why are you being so defensive about me correcting it?
Did you know Shadows of Mordor copyrighted the Nemesis System and then proceeded to never use it in any other games ever again despite people calling out for it?
That’s one I’d like to see
Patented, not copyrighted, but I think you double posted.
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Nah, they’re different comments
I really want to see a god game with gestures, like black&white, make the jump to VR
I’ve tried some indie attempts at it, all either so buggy as to be unplayable, terrible controls, or both
Maybe one day there’ll be a good one
The scrolling health bar in Eartbound/Mother
Take a look at Half-Life 2’s old Face Poser software. I feel like you don’t see that sort of action-level control much anymore.
Indie studios are evading the need for lipsync entirely, by making simple models, giving people masks, putting them on radio overlays, etc. AAA studios are overengineering it, putting a $4,000,000 actor in a motion capture suit for each of their cutscenes to capture every fine detail as they stare in wonder at the white ping-pong ball in the studio with the sign written; “LOOK HERE”.
Face Poser was a good median; it’s where the director gets control, but you don’t need a vast technical setup beyond animations, some vowel extraction, and some basic know-how. It means that if the director wants to add a criticism “No, character B should give a dubious, unsure look when character A says that”, it’s something they can apply directly rather than ask the animators to do by hand.
For some reference, old machinima like Clear Skies, or my own “AS” made use of Face Poser.
Tanking with shields (force/kinetic shields in sci-fi games, not physical shields)
I liked when games let you face-tank damage with your shield (like in Mass Effect, before Andromeda where they made shields weak af and even removed shield gating) and not having to care for healing (unless you lose all your shields)
I don’t know if it’s due to the souls-like trend, but it feels like game developers need to make punitive games nowadays
Battlezone II had force shields. They used your vehicle’s weapon energy. The shields used energy, and also taking hits would drain your energy. You needed a ship with fast energy regen to make the most use out of them. One ship from the X-Mod mod, the Jade Falcon, could actually regenerate faster than the shields drained. So you could keep them on all the time, and still shoot some. It wasn’t invincible by any means, but that regen speed plus the fact that the radar ping twice as frequently made it my absolute favorite ship.
Horizontal progression. Relatively flat power curve, but you gain more options.
Guild Wars 1 is a really good example of this.
I miss casual flight sims that were designed to be played with a joystick. Not so much Janes F-15 1997 or whatever, i’m more talking about Crimson Skies. I want more Crimson Skies.
VTOL kiiiinda fits, maybe?
I really wished there are more games that implement something like the gambit system from FF12. My dream game is some monster / pet collecting and battling game plus the gambit system from FF12. now if only n*ntendo wouldn’t be such an @ss…
Check out Unicorn Overlord (I know, awful name).
Definitely a different kind of game than FF12, but the way the combat works reminds me quite a bit of gambits. Really fun game too, with beautiful art style.
Oh, it’s one of Vanillaware games with their distinct art style! Doesn’t seems to be released on steam though. Too bad because it seems like a perfect game to play on the steam deck.
Bummer… And yeah, it is, I put a ton of hours into it in PS4 remote streaming to my Deck
Destructible environments like in silent storm. You could remove walls and floors with grenades or mines. Unfortunately it was a bit buggy and slow. Teardown is fun, but it feels like a tech demo.
Like in the finals, kinda?
No, it was more a turn based game with npcs, and you had to extract people, kill targets, or return objects from the map. By strategically placing mines on windows or doors you could take out enemies, and remove cover for other enemies, or accidentally start a chain reaction that would blow up other barrels nearby.
The downside was that the game was terrible slow, with what feels like 5seconds per npc to make a turn (even when they where not revealed yet), which is annoying with sometimes 20 npcs per map, who can take sometimes multiple rounds to finish if you are unlucky and miss. And any explosion that would destroy the environment would also bring even modern PCs to a grinding halt. The game was from 2003, but only runs on a single core.
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Vehicle combat games. Which I guess is more like a genre than a mechanic.
Right now it’s basically Mariokart or nothing.
Grip came out in 2018, but the physics were really unforgiving (clipping a corner could cost you like 10 seconds as you tumble) and there weren’t enough players online.
Which is a real shame because it’s gorgeous, fast paced, with effective power ups, and amazing tracks. And a hell of a sound track.My friend made this top down racing game with guns. It’s free to play in the epic store: https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/p/auto-drive-c2db17
The vehicle damage modelling from GTA 4. The fact that it hasn’t been surpassed is tremendously disappointing to me.
Not the same genre, but have you tried BeamNG? That tech should be in every game with cars.
For me this is more about open world games losing cool features than wanting to play a game with that feature. In GTA 4 it affected the choices I’d make whilst driving as it was entirely possible to make a vehicle nearly impossible to drive without coming close to blowing it up.
In an open world game that isn’t about racing*
Games like wreckfest have pretty great damage modeling. BeamNG too.
I couldn’t be bothered to come up with a neat way to say “GTA-like games” and decided to hope that the reader could intuit that context.
The instant i read farcry 2 i thought of the fire too.
The fire was amazing and gave me interesting ways to burn out enemies in outposts etc.
NFL 2K5 gameplay in a newer football game
Magicka 2 combat in some 3rd/1st person action RPG
