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?
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Nemesis system. But
WankerWarner Bros tossed a patent on it and no one else could use it.The nemesis system patents and Namco’s loading screen mini game patent are two examples of why game mechanics and features should never be granted an exclusive patent.
Of course Namco’s patents expired in 2015 at a time when seamless load screens had become the industry standard.
Who knows what the gaming landscape will look like when people are finally able to get their hands on the nemesis system again?
What’s that?
There’s plenty of better deep dives on YouTube, but basically it’s a system in Shadows of Mordor (and moreso in Shadows of War) that would take a random NPC you were fighting and were joined by (or almost killed,) and elevate them thematically. If one knocked you down there’s a chance they would pick up your sword and break it, smack talk you, and walk away. That guy, of his name was Doug, became Doug the Sword Breaker. Never time you saw him, he’d get a short introduction and a quip or two to remove you of who he was.
If you died, since you were a spirit they’d just mock that they already best you before. But if you were killing them, they might get a scene where they manage to get away to amplify the story. Or maybe you’ll just kill them. It was random and happened with random NPCs, elevating them in the enemy army.
I believe in the second one you could even mind control someone, and take out the people above them, and have a spy in the upper ranks.
Imagine an action game with some Crusader Kings plot drama happening.
Honestly I think there’s probably enough prior art to get away with using whatever you wanted from it. But a) I’m no lawyer and b) I’m not risking millions of dollars making a game.
Basically a pseudo random system that’d generate orcs for you to meet-fight-recruit they’d have very fleshed out intros
I’m currently enjoying a Skyrim playthrough that uses the Nemesis mod. It doesn’t have ALL of the features that the shadow series does of course, but I’m really enjoying it!
Link to the mod?
Ooh, I started a new VR playthrough recently, without a concrete plan (well, beyond joining the Brotherhood, because Music of Life by Young Scrolls is amazing).
This looks like it could spice things up!
It didn’t really take off to begin with but dual screen support like Supreme Commander had with the real-time map overview on the 2nd monitor. It could be a skirmish map or live track map for a racing game, live scoreboard, player status or inventory system.
I think you’re describing the Nintendo DS.
Yeah I guess I am. Just give it to us in a bigger form.
I would love if Civilization or Crusader Kings implemented this.
Racing sims typically support telemetry that can be used to display info for the driver or overall race info. E.g. a dashboard on a phone mounted to the wheel stand, or a realtime online display and timing. People even make devices like wind simulator or ass-shaker for immersion.
Check out SimHub for customizable widget software that supports many games.
Yeah I do all that myself with ETS2 but wanted to give another example.
Actually, when I played ‘OpenTTD’, i.e. the remake of ‘Transport Tycoon’, I wanted the game to broadcast telemetry of my enterprise’s economy, so I could dump it into a spreadsheet and gawk at the numbers. This indeed could’ve also been a second-monitor activity (or rather, second computer since I played on a tablet).
Split screen coop/multiplayer
Way too many games only let you do multiplayer with one player and have online only coop campaigns
Used to be pretty standard that a guest could play with you online
The thing new games don’t have that I miss from old games is friends to play the game with 😭
I want to see puzzles that are implemented using the physics engine. And I don’t mean “toss the axe in the proper arc to trigger the gate” physics. I mean “stack the bricks on one end of the seesaw to balance it long enough to make the jump to the next platform”. Or “use the blue barrels’ buoyancy to raise the platform out of the water”.
A grapple hook
Just cause 2 with infinite distance grapple hook and chuck Norris character model. Too fun
there’s a grappling hook in ARC Raiders (called the snap hook) and I have one but have never bothered using it. I should change that some day.
The grappling hook was a common mod in the original QuakeWorld scene and was included in the official Quake II CTF game mod. I’m surprised it didn’t become a mainstay in games afterwards, it was so fun to use. Shogo: Mobile Armor Division had it built in and was one of the most fun FPS games I had ever played until cheaters took over.
Just cause 2 with infinite distance grapple hook and chuck Norris character model. Too fun
Sekiro
Mods and self hosted servers
Arcade racers that aren’t just… Bad.
Burnout Revenge was a beloved game of my childhood. You had bonuses from wrecking your foes, got bonuses for creating wrecks, and for near death experiences. And there was an awesome mode where you would launch your car into a scene to cause as much damage as possible.
Midnight Club 2 where you could customize your cars and race them on fun tracks, but could also just beep around the open world.
Maybe it’s nostalgia, but I would love a fun racing game that doesn’t have a GTA attached to it.
Try ‘Wreckfest’: it’s similar to ‘Burnout’, but with better physics. Also ‘Circuit Superstars’ for a top-down racer with decent physics, pit stops, and multiplayer.
There are also ‘The Crew 2’ and ‘The Crew Motorfest’, ‘Tokyo Xtreme Racer’, ‘Asphalt Legends’, ‘Formula Legends’, ‘iRacing Arcade’, and of course ‘Forza Horizon’ 4/5 — but I haven’t played any of these, so ymmv.
Check out Trail Out.
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.
The scrolling health bar in Eartbound/Mother
The Fiend’s Cauldron from Kid Icarus Uprising. At the start of a stage, you have to wager currency on how high of a difficulty you want to attempt, on a sliding scale from 0.0 to 9.0. Higher difficulties cost more to play, and if you fail, you lose your bet and the difficulty drops if you choose Continue. It’s an interesting system for how it forces you to check your ego and self-evaluate just how much you think you can handle.
Goddamn this game is just so good that that cauldron is a really fun little mechanic for it
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
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.
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?
The vehicle damage modelling from GTA 4. The fact that it hasn’t been surpassed is tremendously disappointing to me.
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.
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.
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?
