I was trying to think of which games created certain mechanics that became popular and copied by future games in the industry.
The most famous one that comes to my mind is Assassin’s Creed, with the tower climbing for map information.
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Batman: Arkham Asylum’s free-flowing combo system was copied by many future games.
And unfortunately, not one of them did it better.
The Spider-Man games come close, but that first Arkham game was just so well done
They might be closest, but they’re still pretty far off. One of the core pillars of Arkham combat is that it would punish you for button mashing by dropping your combo, meaning you not only gain fewer points at the end of combat but also lose access to your instant finishers, which are all too valuable for taking out the toughest opponents. Spider-Man is happy to let you mindlessly mash, and it’s far worse off for it.
Might just be because I’m just starting out, but Spider-Man’s combat is much more punishing for me. Could just be the higher emphasis on using specific combos on certain enemies, which I have some difficulty keeping straight.
i think Shadow of Mordor did actually. the system was pretty similar but it didn’t feel as magnetic, which is an improvement.
I did like the magnetic nature of Arkham, and since Mordor lacked it, they let you hold your combo streak for longer, which also made it too easy.
yeah i don’t care so much about ease, i care about how it feels. Arkham’s combat was fun, but the insane distances you could instantly travel made it feel like the game was playing itself. mordor’s solution is better imo. but it obviously comes down to personal preference.
Which game popularised the now household mechanic of being shut down after a couple of years?
Congress.
EverQuest required a subscription fee every month and created a gold rush. The shutdowns come when you don’t find the gold that they did.
Weird calling out EQ which os still going and even getting expacs afaik
It is, and I don’t think it’s even the first game to require a subscription fee. It was just so successful at it that everyone wanted that monthly recurring revenue. When it doesn’t work, they’d often rather see the game cease to exist.
cries in Asheron’s Call
First thing that came in to my mind was Gears of War with its specific third person view and hiding behind covers. I don’t think it was the first game with that mechanic but the most influential one
The term I refer to is “hiding behind cover” singular - so when I hear “hiding behind covers” I think of the COG seeing locusts, getting scared, and wrapping themselves up in blankets. Lol
when I hear “hiding behind covers”
Operation Blanket Fort
Operation WinBack from 1999 is considered the first third person cover based shooter.
This is true but Gears popularised it
Showing my age here, but what’s the difference between hiding behind cover in Gears of War vs what we did in LAN parties for UT or Wolfenstein 3D?
Snap to asset change camera angle Vs jiggle peak
This game is a broken buggy mess but in a good way
Third person view was first seen in the first Lara Croft game, I think?
I think you need to be more specific than just “third person”. Third person view was in Pong, Pac-Man, Asteroids, Centipede, etc. It’s the default for most games.
First person was probably introduced with Battle Zone.
Which, I don’t mean to sound pedantic, I just literally don’t really know what you mean here.
Your examples are of bird’s eye view games, not third person.
Then you will need to extend that to the OP of this comment chain as they didn’t specify either what Gears of War is. I am going to edit my comment to clarify but I do feel you are too pendantic for asking this.
Thank you. Sorry. Never played that game and didn’t know that was specific to FPS. I know some arcade shooter games had that mechanic, but not in the context of free-roaming FPS. I think you’re right about Tomb Raider.
Warcraft started an entire genre of games. Blizzard took that concept and created StarCraft, which spawned million dollar tournaments.
Yeah, however before Warcraft there was Dune II. But I am not sure which one was more popular at the time and I think Dune II came way before Warcraft.
I think why Dune II is more notable though is that the first Dune game was more of an adventure style came, not a strategy game. Then they changed the game with its successor and introduced the asymmetrical factions that each had a few unique units with differing strategies.
Warcraft took that concept further of course. But even there its rather Warcraft II that really had a big breakthrough.
You mean RTS games? Warcraft is from ‘94, two years after Dune 2 was released.
I think he means Mobas or Tower Defense games
Ocarina of time, 3d, lock on, one enemy attacks at a time. So much of modern gaming pulled from ocarina of time
The fact they used Navi to do the targeting really demonstrates how the devs felt they needed to explain the new mechanic and not just use it ‘because game.’
Love oot, but the only thing it brought 3d too was the Zelda series. For lock on Mario 64 had it, not sure if anything else did before then.
Oh wow, did Zelda really make this popular? I wouldn’t have guessed. I’ve play it a ton.
I know the “hold a button to lock-on to an enemy” was in Mega Man Legends, but in the first game you had to stand still for the lock to work. On MML2, you could lock and run around freely, but that game came after OoT
I wonder what the source of the RTS conventions was. Ctrl num for making groups. Double press to centre on group. X for scattering units. A to stop them. Pretty sure these predate C&C but the only one before that I can think of is dune.
Dune was the second RTS ever though
The Sims for the scrub-the-toilet mechanic.
Battlefield 1942 always stands out to me as the one that popularized large scale online battles on big maps with vehicles. At the time it was revolutionary in online gaming.
Command & Conquer: Renegade came out around the same time as well, with similar features. I kinda wish that game had a sequel as well.
Another gameplay feature that comes to mind is the exclamation/question mark above NPC characters for quests. I remember it first from WarCraft 3, but I think it really kicked off with World of WarCraft to get adopted by many more games.
I’m not sure I’ve ever had more fun with any game than I did with BF1942. It was just so much fun. There were games with smoother play and deeper mechanics and better graphics, but none were as fun. The dumb mechanics made it amazing, like being able to lie down on the wing of a plane and snipe people while your buddy flew, or dive bombing and parachuting out at 10ft above the ground to capture a point, or shooting the main cannon from a tank into a barracks that has 15 people spawned inside it, or piloting a goddamn aircraft carrier and running it aground to get to a spawn point safely. It was so stupid but so fun.
Renegade was some of the most fun I ever had in a shooter. Truly a unique experience
Was it the first to allow you to look on the map to choose where you respawn, specifically on teammates?
Battlefield 2 intruduced that one.
I don’t remember being possible to spawn on teammates in BF1942, but definitely remember it as a first to select spawn points on map like Battlefield always did.
I remember an old BF1942 mod that had spawn selection; I don’t know exactly how far back the feature went, but it was around for a while before BF2.
desert combat? that was the shits
I can’t remember if that mod had squad spawns. But I definitely remember playing it a lot, that was an absolutely revolutionary mod with so much content, not to distract from other great BF1942 mods though. I believe the original DICE team originated from that mod team to create Battlefield 2 as well.
Battlefield 2142 had that, don’t know it that was the first one to do that though. Might’ve been BF2.
I can confirm that you could pick spawn points in BF2 and BF2142.
dark souls
Metroid, which spawned more than half of all indie games.
More than half seems bold, otherwise I agree
It sure feels like more than half of them label themselves as some blend of metroidvania, as long as it isnt a cardbattler or a roguelike, its 100% going to label itself a metroidvania.
I guess I just look at it as you’re saying FPS, MMO, RPG, RTS, etc are less than half.
The first RTS is an obscure Japanese game called Herzog Zwei,
Westwood studios then made Dune 2 and Command & Conquer which basically polished and popularised the genre for the rest of the world.
Pretty much every RTS that followed took at least some inspiration from how those games worked
Warcraft came a year before Command & Conquer and improved on many concepts that Dune II introduced.
Yeah, you’re right to highlight warcraft although I don’t think it’s a clean line with Warcraft between dune 2 and c&c. C&C was probably around 2 years into development by the time Warcraft came out, and my assumption is most of the actual game design was pretty finalised by that point. Though I’m sure some minor influences made their way in, I don’t think Warcraft massively affected the kind of game we got in the end.
But yeah that’s not to diminish the contribution of warcraft to the genre, there’s loads of games that followed copying the Warcraft style of RTS, even as part of the c&c series in the end with Generals.
Towards the end of the decade Total Annihilation would be released and it’s modern day fan made remake, Beyond All Reason, is really good. Sad there’s no campaign though, I really loved the TA campaign
gonna be real, WC1 was not a huge title at the time. I think a lot of people look back, rightly, at WC3 being one of the greatest RTS of all time and then think the whole series was lauded at release, but Warcraft: Orcs and Humans was just okay.
How about the flowing hair on Lara Croft in Tomb Raider 2 and later?
From my understanding, they wanted to have that working for TR1 but missed the deadline, so Lara got a static hair bun in TR1.
Iirc Halo was the first to use left joystick as forward/backward and left/right strafe; and right joystick as look up/down and pivot left/right.
I even recall articles counting it as a point against the game due to its ‘awkward controls’ …but apparently after a tiny learning curve, the entire community/industry got on board.
I thought goldeneye had that basic controls concept a few years before.
edit: ah forgot n64 only had one joystick. but basically the same with the left d-pad and middle joystick.
If not GoldenEye, then I believe Perfect Dark would let you plug in two controllers for a dual analog control scheme.
Goldeneye did allow this. Crazy. Hard to use other buttons though.
Goldeneye got it functional, but it was janky. Try playing 4p with the old N64 controllers and you’d sorta struggle to move and aim.
Halo updated the standard with something usable in modern games. I think a few games in that genre also set the expectation that weapons should have no aim penalty while strafing, since console players would use small strafing motions to do light aim correction.
I think you are right, but the N64 controls used the C buttons as analog inputs for camera movement.
If we’re talking Goldeneye, I believe the C-button aiming was an alternate control scheme. IIRC, the default controls had the stick control both your forward/backward motion, but also your left/right turning, instead of left/right strafing, so your aim was controlled horizontally by the stick, but vertically was pretty much locked on the horizon at all times. To do fine-tuned aiming, or to aim vertically at all, required holding R to bring up the crosshairs which you could then move with the stick, while standing still.
In hindsight, it’s amazing that we ever tolerated that.
One of my friends still owns an N64 and wants to play Goldeneye and Perfect Dark sometimes. This control scheme raises my blood pressure so much lol.
They have options to switch to a more “traditional” control scheme.
I got anxiety just reading your post. Ugh.
Tank controls.
Metroid Prime used them too, and it worked fine. The game was designed around it, so enemies were either already on your level, or were slow enough to react that you could stop and aim.
The remake has other control schemes, but I don’t use them because I like the one the game was made for.
Tbf it was always gonna be hard to make good fps controls on the N64 controller. The movement itself was fine once you got used to it (including strafing etc), but the real sticking point as you mentioned is the shoulder button aiming. It pretty much forced you to stop dead to aim accurately. So you really had to pick your time to hold position and take a few shots before running again.
I still had a lot of fun with it despite knowing there were better options out there with mouse and keyboard (although come to think of it when I was first playing wolfenstein and Doom I think I played with keyboard only back then).
You’re correct. In addition you could strafe using left/right C buttons, and you could look up/down using up/down C buttons, but that was awkward and not really designed to aim.
But we also must remember that those games had an auto lock system. Your character would actually target the ennemies by himself, you would only use the crosshair to dona headshot when you have time to aim, or to aim at a specific object in the game.
But yeah, that seems so clunky compared to what we have today
Goldeneye scheme was forward and back on the joystick moved forward and back but left and right on the stick turned the camera in that direction. The opposite movements were on the c buttons (strafe left and right and look up and down).
It was incredibly disorientating going from that to Turok which used the strafe on the c buttons and looking on the stick. It’s the same feeling I now get when I try to go back to Goldeneye now that the other orientation has been made universal.
On a side note, the goldeneye controls allowed for a unique way of moving around the map with circle strafing that you can’t really replicate in other games.
The original Medal of Honor for the Playstation 1 had an alternate control scheme that let you move in the modern dual stick manner.
https://www.escapistmagazine.com/alien-resurrection-playstation-1-argonaut-games/
Alien resurrection was the first and got panned by critics for it
Spacewar! was a F2P PvP game with no microtransactions and no battle pass. Although it’s hard to quantify exact player numbers (it precedes Steam charts), for a while it was the most played videogame in the world.
Its real-time graphics and multiplayer combat were very influential, and widely copied by many other games.
for a while it was the most played videogame in the world.
I see what you did there!
Space War history
SpaceWar is the first game to be frequently ported to different computers, back when computers took up a big portiom of the room they sat it, and when “porting” was practically re-coding, from scratch, in Assembler.
It also popularized the “mechanic” of online matchmaking through steam for pirated and abandoned games. Thank you Spacewar, very cool.
Wow this brought it full circle, the name looked familiar but then it clicked, back in my pirating days lol
Quake revolutionized fps games
Ape Escape was the first PS1 game to require the dual shock controller
I’d argue that quake did far more for 3D graphics then it did for FPS. Like Doom is what got FPS into the spotlight even though Wolfenstein 3d came first. Like quake is pretty much what made real 3D possible and doable on the hardware of the time thanks to everything going on under the hood
And then there was the Quake 2 engine which gave us Deus Ex, American McGee’s Alice and then (through the modified GoldSrc version) Half-Life, Counter Strike and countless others! The family tree of 3D engines is really interesting.
and the Unreal engine which gave us I don’t have any idea how many but just a staggering number. Both solid games on their own, but long-term the engines were the real rock stars
Absolutely, we didn’t even have any special graphics cards at the time for 3D, I believe? I remember that started some time around Quake 2 but I am not sure, I might remember wrong.
This is correct. I remember running Quake II in software mode with hardware effects (could that have been OpenGL already?). It ran at like 1 frames per second, because I didn’t have a 3D graphics card. Although the lighting looked lovely when you shot a rocket through a hallway.
While I don’t know much about video cards, the IBM Monochrome Display Adapter (MDA) is often called the first video card and had a couple of contenders for first that were either designed earlier or released at almost the same time in 1981 and were all for displaying text only. The first GPU card sold to the public was the GeForce 256 in 1999. I’m assuming there’s some in between that were not really used by the public that would have been used in movies and whatnot.
The reason why nobody was selling GPUs before Quake was because quake was THE first 3D game. Doom and other games before Quake were 2.5D and didn’t have 3D models only sprites. Games before Quake essentially mimicked 3D while Quake IS 3D
The first GPU card sold to the public was the GeForce 256 in 1999
3dfx cards like the Voodoo and Voodoo2 were 3d accelerators that predated nVidia’s offerings.
And even from nVidia themselves, the Riva TNT was a GPU released before the GeForce models.
Ohhhh! I think the Riva TNT (or Riva TNT 2?) was my first 3D accelerated graphics card! What a time to be alive was that.
The first PC that I bought myself has a TNT2 with 8mb of memory. I upgraded it some time later with a GeForce 2 and the difference was shocking.
The term GPU wasn’t used yet. It got applied as something of a marketing term to cards that had hardware transform and lighting, and that was indeed the GeForce 256. Before then, they were “3d accelerators”.
You can see this on the Wiki page for the GeForce: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_256#Architecture
GeForce 256 was marketed as “the world’s first ‘GPU’, or Graphics Processing Unit”, a term Nvidia defined at the time as “a single-chip processor with integrated transform, lighting, triangle setup/clipping, and rendering engines that is capable of processing a minimum of 10 million polygons per second”.
So it kinda depends on perspective. If you take Nvidia’s marketing at face value, then the GeForce 256 was, indeed, the first GPU. You could retroactively apply it to earlier 3d accelerators, including the SNES Super FX chip, but none of them used the term at the time.
The first GPU card sold to the public was the GeForce 256 in 1999.
No it wasn’t. Rendition had the Verite back in 1996 that was true 3D and 2D on the same single video card. At the same time as the Verite was the 3DFX Voodoo (released 1995), but it was 3D only and needed a second card for 2D. Rendition was also the only 3D accelerator natively supported by Quake.
Nvidia did indeed market it as the first GPU at the time. You can retroactively apply the term, but it didn’t exist before then.
