What games popularized certain mechanics?
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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Slay the Spire spawned a ton of deck builder roguelites.
Without which we wouldn't have the only true deck builder roguelite, Rogue Light Deck Builder.
https://youtu.be/FC0QczcuFX0?feature=shared
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
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
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
Operation Blanket Fort
Third person view in an FPS (first person shooter) type of game was first seen in the first Lara Croft game, I think?
If you are attempting to ask which game popularized 3d, third person shooters, then yes, the original Tomb Raider is probably the most early, widely popular game that popularized this.
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.
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.
Your examples are of bird's eye view games, not third person.
Donkey Kong (1981) popularized having different levels in a game to progress a storyline. Until then, you would have the same level over and over with increasing difficulty
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.
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.
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.
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.
DICE hired a few of the DC devs to work on BF2, then promptly laid them all off about 6 months or so after release, and then the laid off devs and others who weren't hired made Kaos Studios, and made Frontlines: Fuel of War and Homefront, before being corporate acquisitioned into non existence.
There were a few BF42 mods that, on certain maps with certain vehicles, allowed you to spawn in vehicles.
IIRC, Forgotten Hope had a number of para-assault maps that allowed players to spawn inside of the aircraft they would parachute out of.
I believe you could also do this in... I can't remember the name of it, but the Star Wars themed 42 mod (which the BattleFront series either largely copied or was directly inspired by), I think it had some spawn-in-able vehicles as well.
Also BF Vietnam, the official game, used a similar concept of having 'tunnel exits' that could be built/placed by Viet Cong engineers, which were placeable spawn points, and the US had the 'Tango' ... mobile river boat with a helipad thing... which was a mobile spawn point.
I am 99% sure it was BF2 that first introduced being able to spawn on a player, I don't think any of the mods for the earlier games pulled that off always had to be a vehicle or placeable static object.
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
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.'
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
Oh wow, did Zelda really make this popular? I wouldn’t have guessed. I’ve play it a ton.
Love oot, but the only thing it brought 3d too was the Zelda series. Didn't realize about the lock-on mechanic, would've sworn it was in earlier stuff, but I guess not.
Though it was used in a few games before, a Quake tournament and Half Life 1 cemented the use of WASD controls.
ESDF is the superior keybinding
Asdf is just better for general key availability imo
I never understood this for first-person shooters. You can't walk forward and backward at the same time, so I don't see why being able to press the forward and backward movement keys at the same time would be useful at all.
Top down games with 8+ directions of movement it's great, though.
It's not about being able to push both movement buttons at the same time, it's about being able to push more buttons in general. For hero shooters, mobas, MMOs, and other games with lots of inputs spreading out your reachable keys is really good.
It's such a pain remapping controls on every. single. new. install.
But it's worth it. Fuck wasd
it's one key over, is it really swear-word level different?
If naughty words cause you a level of righteous indignance, my recommendation is to abstain from online activities until one reaches the age of majority
I am glad I am not alone!
There literally dozens of us!
But for real, i struggle to play games with wasd default and now keybind changes. Part of it is as simple as my hand is just used to using esdf and I constantly hit the wrong keys in those games. But the loss of useable keys on my pinky just feels so bad.
^ This. So much this.
Used to play Warframe pretty religiously with wasd, where shift was part of a key movement combo. After a year or so, developed significant pain in my left pinky.
Shifting to esdf was damn awkward for about 2 weeks. The sheer pinky comfort though.👌
I wish I could upvote twice. It just allows so much more customization, that allows much more comfortable hand positions. I often with disable my caps lock and use A and caps lock as run and crouch.
I am unable to play Fallout 4 because E is hardcoded to be "Use." You can change all the movement keys, but for some reason you cannot change that keybinding. So you can make E be forward movement, but every time you approach a door or chest or person you will automatically open or talk whether you want to or not.
It made the game completely unplayable for me.
Esdf requires more dexterity and is generally less accessible.I'm an idiot and misunderstood which key bind was being talked about
Been RDFG since about 2002. One of my roommates in college was in the top thousand on Unreal Tournament. He talked me into it. God, I get good at that game playing against him.
I remember using wsad on an ascii graphics game I played back in 85 or so. I think it was called dungeons and dragons, but was not made by tsr. Larn, hack, and Moria were all similar games but I did not play those until later.
yeah HL definitely was the one popularized it as default. quake players changed the bindings for it; i know because i played that game with old-school doom/duke controls
Bullet time was popularized in max payne.
And perfected in The Specialists!
Maybe cheating a bit but there are several genres of games that are named after the games that popularized their mechanics such as roguelike/roguelite, souls-like, metroidvania
Minecraft for the fully breakable/buildable procedural open world.
Minecraft is far more responsible for the survival crafting genre that followed in its wake.
Minecraft Hunger Games, although a mod, is responsible for the Battle Royal hype aswell.
So Minecraft caused Fortnite twice - once as a survival crafting and building game and then as a Battle Royal retaining some of these elements
What's the timeline on that mod versus the Battle Royale mod for DayZ? Because as far as I could tell, the DayZ mod is the true progenitor, but DayZ was itself inspired by Minecraft.
I couldnt find a release history for the Minecraft mod, however according to the following article, it was released about a year before the original PlayerUnknown mod for DayZ / Arma 3.
Warning: Cant decline cookies (at least in EU)
https://www.eurogamer.net/before-fortnite-and-pubg-there-was-minecraft-survival-games
It was more a server side plugin than a mod, but that only grew its popularity.
Even randomised loot existed around the map
I miss u bukkit ;-;
Day Z the standalone game was a result of Day Z the mod for Arma 2.
While Day Z (the mod) and Minecraft were in their early phases around the same time (i alpha tested both), I have never heard anyone say that Day Z was inspired by Minecraft, beyond the idea of it being possible for an indie game with a small development team being able to become a huge commercial success.
Pretty sure the actual hunger games movie had more to do with that
As the inspiration yes. But Minecraft hunger games was the first to do it in gaming while also reaching maybe not more people than the movies, but definitly spreading to communities that the movies and books didnt reach (e.g. i didnt watch the movies until well over ten years after I had played my first game of MC hunger games)
I miss MC Hunger Games servers. Are any still around?
Also Mindcrack UHC, not sure if that came before the hunger games mods tho
Idk, I think this game already had a grid base inventory: https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_Schwarze_Auge:_Die_Nordland-Trilogie
April 1992.
Man, that's some good memories.
Yazinda, Durin, Arva von Harben, Tjalf, Melina and Caldrin, I miss you guys.
SC2 did (or did the first mainstream) implementation of a bunch of things, but I'm surprised it was the first for this.
I'd give that to Tomb Raider but both are exceptional.
I don’t think it’s just “being 3D”. Mario 64 put a lot of R&D into particulars of how jumping should work, the camera should work, and what the player’s goals should be. Quite a few games unintentionally copied them, while you could see some games not following their lead early in the 3D days that felt very janky to play. Tomb Raider could arguably be among them with the tank controls, though of course it has its own more niche appeal.
Legend of Zelda OoT followed up with popularizing a targeting button (good ol' Z-targeting) to focus on one object or enemy in a 3D space and move around it or fight/otherwise interact with it. Such targeting has been a standard feature of 3D action-adventure games ever since.
If you want to talk about "how do I get up there" in a 3d environment, Doom did it before TR.
It would be a real stretch to classify doom as a platformer.
And it's a bad one if it applies at all. PC shooters of the time always kinda tried, but it didn't work. The original Half Life got dinged a few points in original reviews because of a few janky platforming sections.
Mario 64 figured out applying analog control to 3d platformers which changed the whole genre, though.
I think Spyro was the first mainstream game to standardise achievements, you could do random stuff in-game and it gave you a little pop up, carried over to Ratchet and Clank and now every game has official achievements
Which one did that?
I believe the very first one had skill points that unlocked an extended ending and game art.
This. They were indeed called Skill Points, and Insomniac loved to tie cheats and bonus material to completing them. I played the shit out of Spyro and Ratchet and Clank back in the day.
Actually introduced in Ripto's Rage. The Reignited version backported them to the first game, though.
Not the first one on the PSX, that's for sure. Also, getting some extra stuff for 100% a game wasn't new by the time of Spyro, both Donkey Kong Country and Crash Bandicoot already did that
Mortal Kombat for the Genesis did that though. Every once and a while on good hit, little dude would pop into the corner and call out, "Toasty!!"
Really makes you feel like you achieved something great
Just a heads up that I think you replied to the wrong comment in the chain
Some like heads up but I far prefer butts up
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.
I felt it was more about the "free flow" in the free flow combat system in Arkham. You want it to all chain together, and Arkham made sure you only hit the buttons you needed to exactly as many times as you needed to. Mordor let you keep your combo going even though it had been like 10 seconds since the last time you did anything, which wasn't exactly flowing at that point. That combo system was a great fit for Batman, and it would fit in nicely with Jason Bourne or John Wick as well, and I'm not sure Lord of the Rings was the best fit for it, but it doesn't seem like many are trying to do that combat style anymore.
I always feel like Prince of Persia: Sands of Time got there first.
Kinda wild to see nobody mention System Shock, the game that invented audio logs. It may seem quaint in retrospect, but at the time all shooters were in the vein of Doom, and story in a shooter was considered "like story in porn." System Shock was not only the first to communicate the plot and next steps to the player through found audio logs, but it also filled the player in on side stories and provided characterization to the survivors on Citadel station.
The game recently got a remaster, and despite very few gameplay changes, still holds up really well in 2024. You can really see the bones of later games in it, such as story focused shooters like Bioshock or F.E.A.R. and I'd really recommend it to anyone interested in playing a great retro game.
They also said popularized, though. System Shock never really got beyond cult classic status, so while it invented them, I'd say BioShock popularized them.
CoD and Assassin's Creed popularised selling the same fucking game 20 times
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
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
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.
I remember having a GeForce 2 as well. Yes, I was really into graphics at that time. :) Ever since Wolfenstein 3D, or DooM, to be honest.
Colored lighting in Unreal for the first time!
Did you have dreams of DooM back then? I remember opening doors in DooM with that iconic sound in my dreams, lol.
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
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.
At that point, what even is the purpose of defining it? It's such a specific term that was designed to only apply to their hardware. It's like creating a new word for a car because you added air conditioning to it.
Sure, they had the first GPU because they coined a term that only applied to one specific product.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_processing_unit
Sony coined the term GPU in 1994 for what was in the Playstation.
Nvidia might have marketed it as the first GPU, but other companies had combined 2D/3D processors on a single chip marketed to consumers well before the GeForce, including Nvidia themselves with the Riva 128. The GeForce was the first product from Nvidia marketed as a GPU, but that doesn't mean it was the first product to market that was either called a GPU or not called that but still was one. It WAS the first to market with a T&L system (though Rendition had T&L on a chip first it never made it to market).
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
That may be what I was thinking of. I actually never played Quake, I just knew it was groundbreaking
For first person shooters (mix of first introduced and popularised):
Doom: started and popularised the genre. Also started and popularised rasterized 3d graphics for gaming (though the game itself was still 2d). Also first fps multiplayer and modding
Quake: various game modes (Deathmatch, capture the flag), as well as being the first true 3d fps. Popularised multiplayer and modding.
Team fortress (quake mod): Different specialist characters.
Goldeneye 64: popularized multilayer console fps, taught character size can be a significant advantage/disadvantage, depending on if you got Oddjob or Jaws.
Half-life: started horror fps genre, (mostly) seemless world
CS: customizable loadouts instead of search for guns each time you spawn, more game modes
UT: AI bots
Perfect dark: secondary fire for weapons
Deus ex: rpg fps
Halo: finally figured out a decent controller control scheme (one stick looks, one moves, button for grenades rather than needing to select grenade from list of guns). First fps I remember vehicles in, too.
Battlefield: large scale multiplayer
Socom: fps game that isn't first person, online console multiplayer
Call of duty: using gun sights to aim
Far cry: open world fps
Doom 3: used lighting (or lack thereof) to bring fps horror to a new level.
Crisis: famous for pushing hardware and people caring more about the benchmark results than the game itself (I tried the second one, it was ok but I didn't really get into it)
Call of duty: zombies (and other alternate game modes), kill steaks, online progression (unlocking guns and attachments as you level, prestige levels)
HL2/portal: brought physics and its involvement in fps games to a new level
TF2: f2p, microtransactions (though not predatory or p2w so the game isn't remembered for this)
Borderlands: loot-based fps rpg
Metro 2033: fps survival
Halo reach: custom maps
Destiny: MMORPG FPS
Overwatch: hero-based, and hero roles (dps, tank, healer)
Pub bg: battle Royale
Alien Resurrection on PSX was the first game to use the dual-stick control scheme. Halo came out more than a year later.
Funnily, it was reviewed poorly at the time:
Game journos have always been a joke.
Yes, but they have definitely become worse in recent years.
i disagree with a lot of this
Which game popularised the now household mechanic of being shut down after a couple of years?
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
Congress.
https://www.escapistmagazine.com/alien-resurrection-playstation-1-argonaut-games/
Alien resurrection was the first and got panned by critics for it
I thought goldeneye had that basic controls concept a few years before. and Turok was pretty close before that.
edit: ah forgot n64 only had one joystick. but basically the same with the left d-pad and middle joystick.
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.
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
I got anxiety just reading your post. Ugh.
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.
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.
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.
Assassin’s Creed and the Open World Gameplay design. It definitely existed before then, but after AC came out, it felt like every RPG switched to the open world map.
I feel like GTA planted that seed waaayy before that. I remember open world games being followed by "like GTA". Assassin's Creed was no exception.
Valid point. I forgot about GTA since that was one of the few banned games in my household.
There have been "open world" games since the 1980s. Just of course, memory limited how big that world could be, and how much you could do in it. The genre as a whole is ancient.
For sure. AC just popularized it.
The first ones I can think of is legend of Zelda and final fantasy, but I think there was also Adventure for the Atari before those even. The first Assassin's Creed was 2007, Adventure was 1980
Which Zelda games were open world (before BotW)? I've always found them annoyingly linear.
The original Legend of Zelda. You had a large open overworld to explore, and IIRC could do many of the dungeons in any order.
Which Zelda game WASNT open world???
Skyward Sword in particular was pretty linear despite technically having a literal 'overworld' of sorts.
That's cool, I haven't played any of the 2D ones (as you've probably guessed!), are they worth playing now for someone with no nostalgia goggles?
I would say the original Zelda isn't, but link to the past definitely holds up. Honestly most of the 2d Zelda's from link to the past onwards are good
It hasn't aged too badly, but it's from an era where you were not necessarily expected to figure everything out on your own -- talking about it with IRL friends or reading tips and tricks in a magazine (or on the early Internet/Usenet) were pretty normal. I would say give it a try but don't be hesitant to look for a guide if you get stuck or lost.
I don’t know what game first came up with it, but Super Mario RPG was the first time I saw timed hits for attack and defense in a JRPG. While the mechanic isn’t exactly ubiquitous it has popped up in a handful of other games over the years and it always reminds me of that game.
This was definitely the first time I also remember this appearing, and it made it more engaging for me as a child.
Rogue for the rogue mechanic. Progressing in a game as far as you can until you die, then using some form of enhancement mechanic be harder faster better or stronger to go again.
Funny enough, Rogue doesn't have a set of permanent enhancement for a wider meta game. In Rogue you start over from scratch always and every time. That's the difference between a roguelike and a rogue liTe game. Binding of Isaac and Spelunky are roguelike. You die, you start over from scratch. Hades and Slay the spyre are rogue lite. Every run gives permanent enhancements that change the next runs, so each time you start slightly different or progressively better.
Hades, yes. That's a premier Roguelite with meaningful meta progression.
Slay the Spire is fuzzy on that point. I would not recommend it to someone looking for a Roguelite. It straddles the line in that it has very limited meta progression which is quickly exhausted and basically works as a tutorial. Once you've maxed out the card unlocks for each character it plays with the same feel as a Roguelike game. It's still not a pure a Roguelike since the starting boon choice and the card swap event allow some minor meta-influence between runs, but there's no more meta-progression.
I often describe slay the spire's meta progression as "a roguelike with homework".
Thank you. That's a flawless description.
A roguelite is ostensibly something that has enough features of a roguelike to be noted, but not enough to be considered one. And I'd argue there is way more to what makes a roguelike than permadeath with no meta progression.
Also Slay the Spire has less meta progression than Issac. Hades is in a whole nother ball park.
Isn't it called "rogue-like" because that last part of metaprogress was not in rogue? Maybe I'm confusing it with roguelite.
Be careful; you're stepping into a holy war. There are some who stick to "the Berlin Interpretation", where there are far more criteria to what makes a roguelike, and from my perspective, it makes those games so close to Rogue that it's not worth giving it its own genre, plus this classification came out just before Spelunky ruined it. Colloquially, you're typically right though. Most will call a game roguelite if your progress gives you upgrades that make the next runs easier, whereas a roguelike may still have unlocks that add more variety or "sidegrades" that are neither better nor worse.
I think the Berlin Interpretation is quite outdated and was not even good at the time, but I will defend it on this one point. It does not provide a threshold for what is and is not a roguelike, the Berlin Interpretation just lists criteria that are important to consider when determining how roguelike something is. The heap paradox is an exercise for the reader.
Inter-run progression was not in Rogue and is a modern concept. And arguably anti-roguelike
I’m curious if it’s actually a different one. That’s the biblical “source” but I feel like there was a long gap before the indie scene picked up that theme in droves. I’m now unsure what it was that started that more modern trend.
Rogue was the originator, but NetHack and ADOM did more to popularize Roguelikes than Rogue itself ever managed. NetHack was the first one I ever heard of, and it's the only reason I know Rogue existed in the first place.
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.
It also popularized the "mechanic" of online matchmaking through steam for pirated and abandoned games. Thank you Spacewar, very cool.
Edit: the Steam one is a test game for their steamworks system with source code from the original game. The more you know.
Wow this brought it full circle, the name looked familiar but then it clicked, back in my pirating days lol
I see what you did there!
::: spoiler Space War history
SpaceWar is the first game to be frequently ported to different computers, back when computers took up a big portion of the room they sat it, and when "porting" was practically re-coding, from scratch, in Assembler.
:::
Jurassic Park: Trespasser invented physics engines in fps games as we know it. The game itself was a buggy mess and a financial disaster. The player's health was shown on the main character's boob for some damn reason. However, they did have the basics of a very good physics engine, and Valve took a lot of their ideas and incorporated it into Half Life 2.
Gears: cover shooter
Prince of Persia: realistic animations with weight. also popularized a platformer subgenre, which was called cinematic platformer but unfortunately the life of the subgenre was cut short due to the advent of 3d.
Diablo: ARPG genre, and even more so loot rarity system (especially the four tiers common/rare/epic/legendary) and affixes in loot as well.
Half-Life: a lot of good things, sure, as pointed out by other comments, but I will also never forgive valve for popularizing the game not fucking starting for ages.
Rogue and maybe more so Nethack: roguelike mechanics.
some really obvious ones are Tetris: falling block puzzles and Sokoban: pushing block puzzles.
also now pretty much obsolete but Overwatch: loot boxes. they existed before, but Overwatch made them an industry standard.
Pacman was the first to simulate a real life mechanic, of munching pills, listening to repetitive music, and running from multicoloured ghosts.
Street Fighter 2 popularized and pretty much set to stone what a tournament fighter game should be. Mortal Kombat came first, but its single-player progression was this weird "tower" with some gimmick fights thrown in, like you vs 2.
Thinking about it, I'd say Mortal Kombat popularized the "REALLY fucking cheap sub boss/final boss" that many other fighting games have (looking at you, SNK) - I mean, good luck getting close to Goro in the first place.
I wonder which korean mmo could be considered as the one that de facto popularized pay-to-win as an integral mechanic.
Diablo hands down popularized not only the action RPG genre, but also having enemies as loot mystery boxes. One lucky kill and you could get your hands on a really great piece of equipment. The amount of clones speaks for itself.
I think Gran Turismo popularized the "carreer mode" of racing games.
Mortal Kombat did not come first. It was quite openly inspired by Street Fighter II.
M Bison cheated a lot in sf2
Being able to instantly use moves that required the player to charge was bullshit.
He was a cheap motherfucker, but nowhere as much as Goro, who had unblockable moves and could interrupt your hits and combos
Yeah Goro was probably cheaper overall, but the CPU in general in SF had unblockable moves and invincibility that they used to interrupt your attack. Of course, input reading goes on in a lot of games and MKI was I'm sure no exception (found this MKII video about it). I think it just got ramped up even more for M Bison, so he ended up being pretty comparable to the MK bosses as well.
Dude, I have not played mortal kombat in ages but I still seethe at the mere mention of Goro
Crush the Castle inspired Angry Birds and several other games with the same catapult mechanic. Loved that flash game way before Angry Birds was put on the App Store.
Arma 2-3 have been responsible for at least 3 major multiplayer genres.
SovietWomble has a video essay that touches this topic.
WASD + mouse aim in FPS. Wolf3d, Doom1 and Blakestone used the arrow keys, spacebar and Ctrl back in the day. The arrows were turn, not strafe too.
I reckon it was some friends of mine in the 90s in Box Hill, Melbourne, Victoria who were the first to use WASD/mouse aim. Share house above a shop at the end of a tram line.
Quake 1 popularized mouselook
I'm not 100% sure if factorio was the first, but the devs at Wube certainly perfected the idea and now there's a whole market for the "factory game" genre.
Even if it's not the first, I'd say it's the first that figured out that computers were powerful enough that you can have a gobsmackingly huge factory.
Ocarina of Time is the mother of modern 3D gaming with Z-targeting.
Doom or Wolfenstein birthed 3d fps I'm p sure 😁
Dune II - basically the grandfather of every RTS game out there (and incidentally very, very different from Dune I): opposing forces, resource collection, tech tree, fog of war, et cetera. Or perhaps it was (not World of) Warcraft, it's been too long and memory gets fuzzy.
Oblivion popularized fucking DLC, holy fucking shit I hate DLC so fucking much I pirated any games that has DLC, I don't mind expansion but DLC can crash and burn in a pile of dogshit
Battlefield 1942 introduced rideable vehicles to the maps.
Halo introduced regenerating health.
Don’t know if this counts, but Resident Evil 4 killed off the tank controls and single-handedly popularised third person cameras for survival horror games.
Resident Evil 4 still had tank controls, but it moved the camera behind the back. Unlike dual analog third person shooters at the time, it did have one major innovation: it moved the character to the left side of the screen so you could more easily see what's in front of you.
I think Halo was what popularized the twin stick controls.
Not even just survival horror, RE4 was a landmark title just as a third-person action shooter. It had a huge influence on the generation of third person shooters that came after it.
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.
DOTA popularized and also invented the battle pass mechanic.
Serious Sam The First Encounter claims to have invented event cued music. Ie, intense fight music stops once an encounter is over.
Quake is believed by many to have invented Rocket Jumping, but Marathon (1993) had two forms of it first.
Marathon and Rise of the Triad both released with duel welding pistols in the same week.
Skyrim for the horse armor dlc.
That was Oblivion believe it or not. Ahh, the good ol' days where everyone got up in arms over even cosmetic DLC.
I thought that the uproar about horse armor was that it was the first pay-to-win DLC. The armor was not just cosmetic but actually provided a stat boost to your horse. The accusation was that the developers had made it too easy for enemies to kill your horse and decided to patch the game to fix it but made players pay for the patch.
Lol you're correct it did increase the health pool, but what I remembered most was the cosmetic aspect, I was young tho
My mistake you’re totally right there!
I remember them having a sale on Oblivion DLC one time where the rest of the DLC was half-off, but the horse armor was double.
Oblivion was weird on DLC. Knights of the Nine was pretty good, and Shivering Isles was amazing. But they also had bullshit stuff like Horse Armour.
It was the beginning of the end, because they saw how much money they made on the horse armour vs how much effort it took to make it. It was actually generally criticized at the time, but it also sold really well.
Souls games. Popularized invasions.
Perfect example that "popularized" is different from "popular".
And also the concept of your collection of souls being recoverable from your last point of death.
I know the "death bag" mechanic had been done before, but the disappearing cache is a core element of Soulslike gameplay that has been repeated so many times since then. It adds a sense of urgency and FOMO to the recovery of your stuff. If you die again, it's gone for good.
Rouge rougelike
Note: read "first" as "first popular/important", not just for this thread but for most conversations across media like this.
Spelunky was the first "Roguelite" that brought permadeath with meta progression to another genre, starting the modern wave of Roguelites.
Pokemon kicked off "monster collection" as a mechanic
To my knowledge, Halo was the first major game to do regenerating health
People always forget that resident evil 4(? There is a million of them) made third person shooters mainstream.
What are you smoking? That's like a 2005 game.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-person_shooter
Hell, Max Payne was definitely more popular, and it came out in 2001.
not 3rd person shooters, but over the shoulder camera.
I'm surprised I haven't seen anyone say Pokemon. From a. monster collecting/battle game nothing has really came close.
The Sims for the scrub-the-toilet mechanic.
Dune 2 for it popularized RTS genre. C&c to bring it to the masses
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.
Why hasn't anybody named Worl of Warcraft? They definitely made a shift in the mmorpg scene..
Or Tomb Raider for the first big budget movie adaptation.
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
Maybe because that one didn't come from videogames. Selection sets or groups have been a thing on UI for a long time, ever since vertex editor on CAD software.
100 coins = 1UP and warp zones? And... you think they're from Crash Bandicoot?
Fair enough.
My point is that the reason you played this game so much is that it existed because of Super Mario.
Thus the answer to OP's question in relation to this would be Super Mario Bro's, from which Crash is derived.
See but the question isn't "originated".
It's "popularised".
Which Mario clearly did, outpassing both "Galaxian" and Crash in terms of popularity.
I know that Crash is bigger for you, but in the big picture, comparing Mario to Crash is like comparing Pokemon to Digimon.
https://vgsales.fandom.com/wiki/Mario
Super Mario Bros. 1985 NES, estimated revenue $1,652,300,000
Have to scroll quite far down this list https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_game_franchises to find Crash.
Hmm. Fair enough, fair enough.
Gothic had NPC pathfinding and behavior routines before Bethesda did it with Morrowind (and Gothic did it better).
Im pretty sure the actual, physical Trading card games like MtG and Pokemon gave us all these games with card mechanics in the late 90s/early 2000s.
Culdcept (1997), Baiten Kaitos (2003), Kingdom Hearts - Chain of Memories (2004). Then the card games weren't as popular for a bit, then the digital ones died out.
And then Blizzard released Hearthstone in 2014. I haven't played the other ones to know for sure, but I believe Yu-Gi-Oh Master duels crafting system can directly trace it's roots to it. Trade cards for dust of a specific rarity, dust from 3 can form a new card, Shiny cards give enough dust on their own for any card, etc. .
I really thought hearthstone came out much easier than 2014.
I think it had like a year long beta where people were playing before full release. I know I was personally playing in 2013.
I remember playing WoW and working on getting all of the battle pets available by playing other blizzard games. But I thought this was in 2012. There was at least one obtained by playing hearthstone.
Another one that comes to mind (that someone can correct me on). Was Uncharted the game that made the “no health bar, but redder screen as you are close to dying” popular?
funny how no one even mentioned World of Warcraft for MMOs because it's too obvious.
There were popular MMOs before WoW, such as Runescape and Everquest. WoW just took a popular genre and rocketed it into the stratusphere.
The question was, "what games popularized certain mechanics." The question was not, "what games created or introduced certain mechanics."
Yes, there were other MMOs before WoW, but WoW took MMOs to a completely new level of popularity. I didn't play ANY MMOs before WoW and wasn't really interested to, but it was so popular that I jumped on to see what the deal was. Since then I have played ESO, LOTRO, AOC, and one other whose name I forget.
Other MMOs were popular among gaming nerds before WoW, but WoW made MMOs popular to normal people.
I tried UO, AC, EQ1+2 and can say that WoW's beloved IP, look and feel, and relative lack of clunkiness in the controls and animations were big differentiators for me.
because it's flat out wrong. WoW aped most of its systems from Everquest, which most of WoW's development team was actively playing. They made some improvements on the genre, but the bones existed as early as 1997 with Ultima Online.
WoW was like the iPhone of MMOs. Didn't invent anything, just put it all together in a coherent, accessible, user friendly package.
the question was "popularized" not "invented".
I promise you, Everquest was plenty popular at the time, and it didn't invent those things either.
sure, we can quibble on the threshold of "popular" here. but you can't question that WOW caused an absolute explosion in MMOs after it. not like anything before.
Dark/Demon Souls. Elden Ring
Rolling to evade incoming enemy attack.
Always thought it being a strange way to do this. Bloodborne and Sekiro dodges seem more realistic.
Hope Vaati explains.
Warcraft started an entire genre of games. Blizzard took that concept and created StarCraft, which spawned million dollar tournaments.
You mean RTS games? Warcraft is from ‘94, two years after Dune 2 was released.
I think he means Mobas or Tower Defense games
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.
Please people, help me out with this, which game popularized any modern game to be a huge ass open world action RPG?
My best bet is that it is The Witcher 3's fault.
Probably any Bethesda game
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_(video_game)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_(video_game)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angband_(video_game)
Depends on how you constrain that idea. Open worlds were a very early idea, but old computers were somewhat capacity limited in how much content you could have.
I would say older than that (well maybe not elite), as much as the tech could handle it you should include:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Esprit
Here you had several town maps, including dual carriageways, main roads, side roads, one way streets. And you could just drive down any of them. They were all nondescript, but the amount of memory really limited what could be done.
There was also the games using the freescape engine. Driller, Darkside and Total Eclipse. These were all about as open world as you could achieve on the hardware of the time.
In terms of "open world" the definition is open to interpretation. I'd argue that text based adventures were open world too in their own way. So it really depends on what features people agree makes an "open world" game as to what the first game that contains all those features was.
Been around since at least early Final Fantasy / Chrono Trigger SNES era (for some values of action). Maybe Atari 'Adventure'.
Could even say it goes back to the Zelda games on NES. Metroidvania games might also count. Those games all have the "you might progress in any available direction" mechanic, which IMO is the core of the open world mechanic.
There's also some games like Star tropics where the whole world was open (as in you could return to previous locations) but progress was more linear.
Would super Mario world count as open world? Not as old as the NES ones I mentioned, but I'm curious. Or say if you could go back to previous worlds in SMB3, would that be open world?
It started long before that, I think ubisoft in general was hugely influential in that trend.
Open world RPGs were always the goal, old games tried to mask the hardware limitations by using several techniques. By the time the Witcher 3 came along open world RPGs were the most common thing, in fact at the time lots of people called the Witcher a sellout because of that, it's like if it had come up a couple years ago and had base buildiechanics, EVERYONE else was doing it.
There are LOTS of examples that pre-date TW3, I'll limit myself to a few, just because it's the ones I played. In the 90s and early 2000s I used to play Ultima Online, which is an MMO from 97 that has a vast open world. But if you want first person, Oblivion is old enough to drink.
Hmm, it lacked the RPG part though... GTA San Andreas on the other hand 😀
In a way, I'd say World of Warcraft (2004 onwards) popularized that.
Here's your starting place. Here's a bunch of easy quests and monsters.
You quit the starting area. Everything feels huge and really, really fucking far away. One step in the wrong direction and you're assaulted by an enemy with a 💀 for a level. Not only that, most people would only see the loading screen once before doing an hours-long playthrough and that also increased the sense of "fucking huge world"
I think the fault lies with Ubisoft and Assassin's Creed. They really championed the idea of a bloated open world stuffed with systems that don't really interact with each other, and now AAA gaming just keeps trying to stuff more mechanics in the pile.
Outcast
First thing that came to mind are the Dragon Age games before, at least Inquisition was sort of action RPG.
Before that in a lesser extent the Assassin's Creed games, although they were more action than RPG.
That said, I greatly enjoyed all these games, including Witcher 3.
dark souls
Minecraft singlehandedly created a genre called “Survival”.
I think most of the games around 2005’s Indie Game Boom created lots of brilliant mechanics that’s been copied still.
Single-handedly? Nah. It pulled a lot of existing ideas together though, and it's certainly responsible for the popularity. Another Minecraft influence is early-access.
Dark Souls popularized the stamina meter and the "dropping all your money on death and having to go pick it back up" mechanic. Not to mention spawning a subgenre of similar games like Lies of P and Lords of the Fallen
The first Dark Souls was 2011. Diablo was released in 1997. World of Warcraft was 2004 and while you didn't quite drop all your stuff and money you die you did have to run back to your corpse to keep from having all your stuff degrade and cost a bunch of money. The first Sonic was 1991 and getting hit makes you drop all your "money" and have to pick it back up.
Mechanic wise the first was Demons Souls in 2009. But your point still stands.
It isn't a question of who did it first, it's a question of who made it popular. Look at how many games have a death run since DS came out. Hollow Knight, Nioh, Blasphemous, etc. It's also not the same mechanic as losing your items on death.
I had a stamina meter in Morrowind in 2002 and in daggerfall in 1996.
They did spawn a sub genre, but the stamina meter being popularized is nonsense.
Those mechanics were lifted/copied straight from Monster Hunter, mind you :)
The PS2 and PSP Monster Hunter games are basically dark souls but you gotta kill giant bosses to transform their scales into better armor and weapons.
Dark Souls is literally just Legend of Zelda for adults, which had a stamina system at about the same time Kings Field did. It's honestly hilarious to me that it became known as the father of the genre, but the immediate copycats were also aiming for a similar tone to FromSoftware so I guess it's fair.
I feel like Call of Duty 4 modernized and standardized the FPS genre on at least consoles. Every call of duty game still looks and feels exactly the same since CoD4 and every other first person shooter copied it's control scheme because it was so firmly cemented.
What did CoD 4 introduce that Halo 3 hadn't already done 2 months prior?
Real world weapon customization comes to mind. Other than that I don't know, I haven't played Halo 3.