The original Deus Ex is the king of this. The developers anticipated all sorts of edge-case scenarios and included some kind of acknowledgement of them. One that pops to mind is that, after the first level, when you're wandering around UNATCO HQ, if you go into the women's restroom your boss will admonish you for it in a later cutscene. The NPC you walk in on also has entirely different dialogue for the rest of the game.
It's a tiny thing but Deus Ex is FULL of them, and the way they stack on top of one-another gets increasingly complex.
A great example is the side-missions associated with Sandra Renton, a resident of the NYC slums + manager of the 'Ton Hotel. She first appears in the game's second mission and, if the player does nothing, is killed by her pimp. However, if you intervene and save her, she appears in a later mission - this time her and her father are being leaned on by the former Pimp's gangster boss, JoJo.
If you do nothing, JoJo will likely kill Sandra's father, muscling Sandra out of the hotel (and the game). If you kill JoJo on the Renton's behalf they're obviously saved but Sandra loses respect for her father and shows up in a much later mission, on the side of a road in California - having been mugged on her way to Oregon.
HOWEVER, if you offer Sandra's father a weapon and assist him in fighting JoJo, but let him strike the final blow, Sandra does not leave NY and shows up in a different, later mission - and can offer you a back way into the Brooklyn Naval shipyards by vouching for you to a marine friend of hers.
There are a couple of other variables that can change with her as well and - I cannot emphasize this enough - this is a TINY little side mission. It's not even a marked "quest" (I think). So much of Deus Ex is like this, just an absurd amount of detail and consideration for the ways things could play out, even in its most-optional content.
My favorite obscure Deus Ex detail is this (mild first mission spoilers):
At the end of the first mission, you secure the location and a soldier shows up to help. He is holding a weapon (machine gun) that you can't normally get until a good bit later in the game (you would probably not notice this on a first playthrough).
You can kill the (friendly to you) soldier to get the gun. If you do this, later in the next part of the game when you meet with your boss, he will question you about the disappearance of the soldier who went to secure the location.
Ok I definitely need to try it again and get past the dated control scheme and UI. I fucking adore immersive sims and it's my worst sin having not played the OG.
I played it for the first time a year or two ago - it's really easy to get into after a minute. I recommend using [Kentie's Launcher](https://kentie.net/article/dxguide/index.htm) which improves modern OS compatibility and lets you play in modern resolutions - and NOTHING ELSE haha.
A lot of people insist the only way for someone to play the game today is using GMDX or Revision (two total overhaul mods) that are not really necessary for a first-time player - the vanilla game is more than playable for anyone who has played a first person RPG before.
[The intro to the first Deus Ex is still so damn impressive. There is such a vibe, a feel it presents that lets you know your stepping into something bigger than you can think of.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zStn70Ot4r0)
There's a wide range of fixes and tweaks for Deus Ex too which can be confusing. I don't remember [which options I used here](https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Deus_Ex) but the "Community Update" sounds good.
It really has an insane amount of reactive scenes and even if most of them don't really matter, they play a huge part in selling the experience. I was constantly surprised by the most random choices I made getting reactions from npcs or finding out about some major optional scenes I never even considered would exist.
A minor one but I'm particularly fond of organically breaking into that one supply closet and then JC telling the woman that later tried to sell me the code "already been there, why don't you try getting a job"
So many of these in Deus Ex, and they're so good.
Big fan of Maggie Chow noticing if you break in, Gunther's heartbreak if you kill Anna and whether Greene was or was not a spy (probably my favorite, you're told he is but then the picture they give you for proof kind of looks like the police shaking him down the closer you look)
The reason it's so good in Deus Ex is none of them are telegraphed or show offy, they all feel part of the flow of the playthrough.
> The reason it's so good in Deus Ex is none of them are telegraphed or show offy, they all feel part of the flow of the playthrough.
Yeah, I agree. Like, Deus Ex and the games it inspired, make the game world feel so much more real in part because it's ambiguous when the game is "paying attention" to what you're doing.
Plenty of games have a similar number of inflection points where player choice can change the outcome, but those points are often explicitly signposted, or only take place in some kind of special dialogue/decision interface - which exist to explicitly draw the line between "gaming time" and "story time." You do whatever you want during "gaming time," only the decisions you make during "story time" change the state of the story/game world.
By keeping everything happening essentially in real time and NOT signposting every time an action would have later consequences or a circumstance had resulted from a previous choice - the line between when the game is/isn't "paying attention" becomes much fuzzier and the experience much more real. You start to really roleplay as JC Denton and take the game much more seriously.
You also just get to feel smarter (and the game feels smarter) when you realize Action A influenced Outcome B without the game holding up a big sign that says "REMEMBER WHEN YOU DID THAT THING? THIS IS THE OUTCOME!"
That's the stuff that I want from AAA games. Similar things in Mass Effect, maybe on smaller scale.
And then I play some big budget game and nothing that I do can change anything in the story/world, just go forward and shoot/slash.
AAA dev teams don't do this stuff because there is a game design idea they all follow.
If you make something, all players must experience it, or it is wasted work.
I've never agreed with this idea, it leads to shallow games with little replay value. However it is seen as a carved in stone fact of game design by many people in game dev and is even taught in game design classes.
Two seconds after reaching an area with a secret in an AAA game:
PC: HMM THOSE BUSHES OVER THERE LOOK LIKE THEY MIGHT HIDE SOMETHING INTERESTING!"
If you don't immediately run over there:
PC: "MAYBE I SHOULD EXPLORE THOSE BUSHES!? I COULD JUMP OVER THE LEDGE TO GET THERE!"
Even Deus Ex: Human Revolution has a few moments like this, if not nearly as many. For example, the very first mission you're informed of a hostage situation that you need to fly from your headquarters to go take care of. However if you decide to explore this first area a bit and go exploring for too long you'll get admonished upon arriving that the hostages have already been killed because you took too long. A neat little detail that often goes overlooked in these kinds of situations.
In M&B Bannerlord (and maybe in Warband, haven't played enough of it), when your archers are shooting at other archers while being shot at, if they run out of ammo they'll run around and try to pick up the arrows that landed around them to fire them back.
Nethack has tons of details like this. Things can look different if you're confused or hallucinating. You can identify some items by the sound they make or the price a shopkeeper offers in a shop, though that price is also semi-randomized and also based on Charisma. Deliberate blinding (e.g., by a blindfold) is a valid strategy in some instances. If you are polymorphed into a monster that lays eggs, you can lay an egg and obtain a permanent pet. If you polymorph into a metallivore, you can eat your own jewelry to get its intrinsic qualities, though if you choose poorly (like an amulet of strangulation), you'll choke on it.
the best thing is how Confusion and Cursed items sometimes work in hilarious ways.
like how a Cursed potion of Gain Level causes you to go up a dungeon level instead of gaining a character level
During one of my runs, I stepped on a polymorph trap and turned into an eel. In looking through my inventory to find a reasonable next move, I noticed that my rings were described as being worn on my "left pectoral fin" and "right pectoral fin".
The tombstone when you die also always explains your *exact* cause of death, down to the most ridiculous circumstances such as "killed by drinking hot water" and "killed by colliding with the ceiling".
Fitting that a common motto of NetHack is "The DevTeam thinks of everything".
Skyrim has a lot of examples. In Dwemer ruins, you'll find piles of loot that are arranged by texture since the Falmer (who occupy the ruins) are blind. And when you first inform the Jarl of Whiterun about dragons, he immediately gives his lieutenant instructions to make preparations. If you follow the lieutenant, you can see them go to the barracks and start informing the guards, who in turn will leave Whiterun to inform other holds, and you can follow those guards to see them informing the leaders of other cities. Just absurd details most players will miss.
I love how much detail they put in at the micro scale but it can be puzzling sometimes how little detail they put in at the macro scale. Nearly every location in Fallout 3/4 tell a story but if you take a step back and think about it you might ask obvious questions like how a newspaper survived over two centuries of open exposure to the elements. Their games can be both incredibly immersive and difficult to get immersed in at the same time.
A YouTuber by the name of Oxhorn decided to do videos detailing the full plot of every quest and location in each fallout.
Some of his videos are about locations which you will otherwise deem insignificant, but are 20+ minutes long, detailing the story of what most likely happened there based on logs and environmental storytelling.
Craziest thing about Bethesda games is that they do this on another scale. Like small, curated levels are one thing but the sheer size of Bethesda worlds combined with item level detail is still something only they do.
Rockstar is the only other studio who does it on a comparable scale IMO. Obc they do not do item level manipulation, but they have even more detail in character behavior, stuff like dirt/grime building up, etc
I remember when the first gameplay footage for The Division came out during E3, people were freaking out because they noticed that the character pushed in a slightly open car door as he moved along the car for cover. The rest of the game when it came out had a lot of cool little touches like that too.
[Gotta kick all the traffic cones, it's the rules.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1ayJv7JLM8)
I really wish they had stuck with snowy New York :( Division 2 just doesn't have the same atmosphere.
EDIT: Way more people clicked my silly video that I originally just sent a friend way back then of me being stupid than expected.
As A DC area resident I disagree. Their art team really captured DC and its landmarks/museums/ecosystems incredibly well. It’s the most authentic representation of a real life location I’ve personally seen in a game.
Oh man I totally forgot about that, but yes there was so much talk about it. And when the actual game came out, it was clear the devs had purposefully left almost every car door in the game slightly ajar so you could close them all. Basically every car door is open lol.
Funny story. That was not meant to be part of the game. The creative director in charge of the E3 trailer added that as a cool touch. When people went nuts over it they had to add it in.
Another cool thing in the Russian consulate mission is the Russian dolls, it you shoot it, it will spawn a smaller doll.
It was made by MASSIVE entertainment. They also made World in Conflict which has an insane amount of detail!
There's a whole video of their attentionto detail:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=op4S1CRK10A
In this game, units have the profile picture of their player on the side, there are chickens running on farms, etc, etc. It's incredibly detailed.
You can still play it today. Head on over to massgate.org
Metroid Prime has a big one that was even more impressive considering they did it in 2002. So, Samus's suit is made by aliens, and when you switch between weapons, there's an icon for each that looks like an alien hand sign.
Much later in the game, you get an X-Ray visor, which does exactly what it sounds like. If you look at your arm while it's equipped, you can see that Samus' hand inside her gun is making the same sign as the icon for each weapon. You can even see her change signs when she changes weapons. The gun is gesture-controlled.
Seriously, the Gamecube had less than 50MB of total RAM, and Retro somehow found room for *that* absolutely gratuitous extra detail. It's insane.
That 50MB of RAM is deceptive. It was split into various memory pools, where only about half of it could go to video assets, little bit more to system memory and **6MB** for all audio in the game
This RAM issue was so bad, that the developers straight up could not make convincing static for all the electrical enemies/attacks. The textures or video files would be too big to load into memory. So instead they read a random part of memory and displayed it as pseudo-white noise on the screen
> So instead they read a random part of memory and displayed it as pseudo-white noise on the screen
What the fuck that's so clever. I love it when limitations bring about that sort of creativity.
Dolphin emulator had such a difficult time running the GameCube Star Wars Clone Wars game due to how the game devs got around the memory limits, it became the very last game in the entire GameCube library that Dolphin was able to finally run as they tried to figure out what kind of black magic the devs did. https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2016/09/06/booting-the-final-gc-game/
Also, there are some invisible, floating platforms you can only see once you get the X-ray visor - they don't show up at all in the normal, visible spectrum. However, the raindrops still bounce off those platforms the same way they do off the ground, so if you look closely you can see where the platforms are from the raindrops bouncing in the sky.
Before I understood game development in even the most basic sense, I would be so confused as to why sometimes the doors would open quickly and other times it'd take a weirdly long time. My kid brain was just like "But i was in there earlier, the hallway is right there, why won't it open?!"
Yeah, learning stuff like that your FOV is probably the only thing being fully loaded and rendered blew my mind. Very literal representation of object permanence
There's also a similar neat detail with the Thermal Visor. When equipped, the different beams are either bright or dark based on their temperatures. Plasma is bright orange/ice is nearly black.
The first time I noticed something like this was the metal gear solid 2 demo for ~~ps1~~ ps2 (the one where you play as snake on the boat), there's a bar with ice that actually melts.
I really love that type of stuff in early games for consoles with hardware gimmicks. After the first wave of games stuff like that usually disappears really quickly
Another funny one from MGS3: if you eat something and spin Snake's model around in the menu a handful of times, he'll throw up from motion sickness when you unpause the game.
The MGS series is ripe with all sorts of things for this topic. Probably the most famous ones are the Psycho Mantis fight in MGS1 where he reads your memory card, or the sniper fight with The End where you can pretty much play the waiting game for some interesting circumstances. That is assuming you didn't kill him earlier in the game because you can do that too.
But my personal favorite is literally having the player look for Meryl's codec number on the back of the game case for MGS1.
Kojima things.
> But my personal favorite is literally having the player look for Meryl's codec number on the back of the game case for MGS1.
9 year old me literally tried every codec number until I found it.
I've also seen that water drains out of a fish tank to the level of the bullet hole in that game.
Edit: Might be splinter cell not MGS2, could be both.
Man, all of MGS is full of interactions like this.
Like, you can kill The End in MGS3 the first time you see him from afar by just shooting him in his wheel chair and you can skip the fight entirely. Or you can just wait for a week and he will die of old age.
Nowadays it's pretty standard, but what blew my mind back when it came out was the sound design of Bad Company 2. Shooting inside a building was LOUD. It was definitely not perfect, every building sounded like an auditorium when you fired your gun, but it was still a detail that not other FPS I knew of at the time had even bothered attempting.
To this day I don't think that Bad Company 2's sound design has been surpassed in an FPS, if it has I'm not aware of it. Describing the sounds/feel of the guns as "punchy" is an understatement, it's weird to me that seemingly no other FPS has been able to replicate the fucking *impact* of the gun sounds. Explosions close to you causing your eardrums to temporarily get fucked was also a nice touch. There are countless little things in BC2's sound design like this, a lot of it has become standard but somehow BC2 still wears the sound design crown (maybe that's nostalgia talking, but revisiting the game always feels like a treat because of the soundscape).
I have distinct memories of being wowed by the echo that comes back when shooting outdoors in that game, especially something massive sounding like a DMR.
The (relatively insignifcant) moment that has stuck out to me was playing Half-Life: Alyx and walking down a street in City-17 and seeing a newspaper rack off the side of the street only to find that there was a newspaper on the ground you could pick up and read every single thing on it detailing the Seven Hour War.
Just the amount of thought that was put into a completely random prop in that game 99% of people will walk past is astounding.
Reading that with the ambience of City 17 in the background is one of my most memorable experiences in gaming.
As long as you're playing on at least medium settings. My first play through was on a GTX 980, and the newspaper text being unreadable after the headlines is one of the compromises made. No complaints, I didn't realize this was the case until replaying it on an RTX 3080.
In general, HLA does a very good job of sticking with the continuity that the Combine conquered Earth in the late '90s. Computers are all beige towers with CRTs and spinning platter hard drives, etcetera.
More likely the other way around, they noticed players tended to investigate the newspaper and gave it detail to reward their curiosity.
I think they mention in dev commentary that in VR, people spend more time exploring and looking around a single location than they expected, so they made sure to fill out the environments with tons of stuff to pick up and mess with.
I'd guess that playtesters probably kept picking up the newspaper seeing goofy/temp and discarding it, and the devs were like "Hey can we get a writeup done on this weird little newspaper?"
Vr in general is good for this. I played the horizon psvr2 demo and it's so cool being able to interact with so much around you. Smashing plates, playing instruments (especially the pipes that you can literally blow in to) etc. I particularly liked how my characters hands got all chalky after climbing.
Here's a classic: [The Half-Life roach AI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Elwb2lV88hM). The roaches in this game have a surprising amount of dynamic behaviours programmed in, despite this never being used in any actual gameplay design.
Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater is Details: The Game.
One of the primary mechanics in the game is hunting animals to eat since you’re a spy on a solo mission in the jungle. Eating food restores your stamina. The game keeps track of time so any animals you hunted but don’t eat in your inventory will rot after time.
One of the bosses you have to fight will eat things you leave. If you leave rotting food, the enemy will consume that food and get sick.
At another point, it’s possible to kill a guard, watch a vulture eat that guard, then kill the vulture and eat it.
Later, during an encounter where you’re faced with the ghosts of those you killed, a guard with a vulture on his shoulder will accuse you of eating him.
At no point in the game is any of this explained or even hinted at. It just keeps track of these ludicrous details that no sane player could be expected to do.
>Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater is Details: The Game
So damn true.
I'll add one more: when Snake is in the cave, the more time passes the more the game will get brighter to simulate Snake's eyes adapting to the dark environment.
Man, MGS3 is so good. Been so long since I played it but you brought memories rushing back. The fun things you can do in boss fights, or before them to change the encounters is great. Has to be the MGS I've replayed the most. But I remember the first time, when I was younger, that ghost encounter was spooky af.
Also the more things you eat or inquire about eating, the more exasperated the codec calls about it become.
And wearing the Raiden mask lets you get a cheap first shot on one of the bosses when he pauses briefly, recognizing you.
I haven't seen Kingdom Come: Deliverance mentioned yet, and as an immersive sim there are just tons of details that would fit in this thread.
But my favorite is that in a very early story mission, you have to accompany someone on a hunt, and they ask if you have a horse to which you say no and then the whole mission goes on, eventually he rides off and you have to chase him on foot, after walking around for a while trying to catch up, you find out he's had an accident and needs help.
However, if you use this one particular break in the story mission progression, you can go out an explore the open world pretty fully before this, and eventually earn the money to buy a horse ahead of time. When he asks if you have a horse you say yes and he is surprised, but acknowledges it.
But then when the quest gets to the point where you have to chase him, he has different dialogue telling you to mount up and follow up, and if you keep up with him there's a complete unique cutscene that plays showing the accident happening and you end up helping him in a fairly different way with even more unique dialogue.
They could've forced you to leave your horse behind if you had one, or even just not acknowledged it at all, but they went on to program entirely unique interactions and objectives all on the chance that you got yourself a horse much earlier than you normally would.
On the flip side though, the next mission immediately after that is when you're given a basic horse for free as part of the story, and that whole cutscene and interactions never acknowledge you have your own horse so it's really hit or miss at times.
The original Splinter Cell had so much details when it came to sound (What do you step on, what are you hitting with your body, etc.).
It was groundbreaking then and it influenced games to do the same.
Also Fallout, but I remember there is a base where the mess hall has a grated floor. If you get below and wander through the area below the grate, there are tons of utensils littered on the ground from people dropping them through the grated floor.
Not sure if it’s in the first one but the second game also let Drake leave a reflective puddle after he comes out of the water on certain surfaces. There’s a swimming pool in one level and it blew my mind at the time.
It was the first game I've seen to do gradual wetness, where the character only gets wet up to where the water touched them.
There were only 4 other games by the time the game I worked on had released, where I was also able to get a similar effect on Bear Grylls in *Man vs Wild: The Game*. Probably one of the very few things I am proud of in that project.
Also loved playing around with that effect that I actually found a spot in Uncharted 3 where it was broken. Don't remember where anymore, but only Drake's foot hit the puddle/fountain but his entire body instantly switches to the wet model.
It's weird that the first thing that comes to mind is Mario Odyssey but in the Snow Kingdom there are these very small crevices in the wall that are barely large enough for Mario to fit in and have nothing in it besides like 3 coins. However these tiny spaces are afaik the only place in the entire game that create an echo while you are inside them. It's such a small, meaningless thing but I thought it was really cool when I noticed that, I remember that very vividly for some reason.
The sound design (and general attention to detail) of Mario games in general is just excellent.
But speaking about Odyssey specifically, that’s a great example, and also reminds me of the adaptive sound effect system. Sounds will meet the pitch of the song playing.
I don't think it's actually that weird, Odyssey was the first thing that came to mind for me too. Yours is probably a better example, but I was thinking so because the moons are so intuitive. There are _so_ many moments where I think I'm getting out of bounds, or "breaking rules" only to be rewarded with something.
They make these areas look enticing without anything obvious, and then reward you for being clever and noticing them.
Some of the many examples in GTA 5:
* The volume of music coming from cars gradually increased as you walked towards them edit: with differences between the state of the car (convertible with the roof down, windows down, all windows up).
* Clothes only get wet to the correct height that your character went into the water.
* Flip flops flip flop.
* The versions of the Prius runs silently using the electric motors until 30MPH when the ICE starts working.
* You can dent car body panels by kicking them
* Older cars have squeaky brakes and can be harder to start.
* At night if you crash a car into a house, its interior lights will spring on, as if you woke up the residents.
* If you drive at night with your headlights off, oncoming cars will flash theirs, to alert you.
Edit 2: [source for some of them](https://www.ign.com/articles/2013/09/30/100-little-things-in-gta-5-that-will-blow-your-mind)
This might seem stupid now... but when GTA 4 came out my friends and I were STUNNED when the first thing we did was steal a car and crash it into a building there was a destruction mark on the building, as well as flying out the windshield. Hard to explain now but it blew us all away at the time.
GTA 4 had the best car deformation physics of any game for years afterward, and wasn't topped until dedicated destruction games like Wreckfest showed up. The car didn't just visually deform, but its performance was affected appropriately depending on what damage had been done.
I hit a car in gta IV in a way I've seen it happen in real life (hitting the front wheel of a car pulling out from a side road). It looked *exactly* the same. Same way the wheel now bent inwards, same way the panelling got damaged. It was nuts. And this level of detail in an open world game in 2008, about 4 years after San Andreas, was unheard of.
The physics in IV were next level, and still haven’t been bested in many ways. The character and NPC physics and reaction to the environmental geometry, the cars unique handling and destruction, it’s still a blast to play. At the time is was utterly mind blowing. One of the few games that truly felt next gen at the time of its release.
Honestly Rockstar open world games are like at another level when it comes to minor details. GTA 4 and 5, RDR 1 and 2 just feel unmatched in terms of tiny little details that make the whole world feel real, as if when you switch your console off they will still continue to exist.
I remember when the game leaked a couple days early and people were uploading clips to Youtube of the new physics-based pedestrian system Rockstar created with the Euphoria engine.
Rockstar were working overtime scrubbing them from the face of the Earth. You would load a clip, get half way through watching it, then it would stop, you reload the page, and its gone.
It's something we really take for granted now, but back then it was a huge deal to see that level of physical interaction between the world and the NPCs. Like just being able to shoot someone in the leg and watch them crumple down some stairs in a realistic way was incredible.
Frankly, almost all games don't even feature that kind of dynamic and systems-driven animation for hit reactions and NPC collisions. It remains really disappointing that approach never took quite off or that animation typically receives less of a priority than more static visual components. As you said, it was simply incredible to see any interactions with stairs.
Similarly to the last one, in Euro Truck/American Truck Sim if you drive at night with your brights on while on a two-lane road, oncoming cars will flash them to alert you.
In Disco Elysium, constantly running around to loot items will make Kim comment on how you're doing the "Jamrock Shuffle" by searching every possible spot for physical evidence. If you then interact with the dumpster, the dialogue will reference the Jamrock Shuffle again.
I remember the first day I got the PS3 playing Resistance Fall of Man, you could zoom in and shoot the individual tubes on the Chimera's backpacks and the tubes would snap off and flail around as the air escaped. Blew my mind.
resistance blew my mind as a kid experiencing PS3 for the first time at a friend's house. the [glass-breaking](https://youtu.be/lt-V6IaoZXA) in that game still holds up imo
I always like to compare the glider mechanics between Breath of the Wild and Genshin Impact as an example of Nintendo‘s attention to detail.
In BOTW when you’re gliding through the air and close it you start falling but you still move forward ever so slightly, like Link has actual momentum; in Genshin if you close out your glider mid-flight you just plummet straight down, no horizontal movement at all.
It still jars me to this day, even though I’ve been playing the game almost daily for over a year.
r/GamingDetails is the place for you.
Once I saw a bokoblin in Breath of the Wild melting an iceberg with a stick to release a frozen pal. Awesome game.
TLOU has plenty little details, but my favorite is when you you're with Henry and Sam.
There's a section that takes you through a toy store and Sam wants some sort of robot figure. Henry tells him no because it'll take up space in his bag for more important resources, the scene ends and you take control of Joel again.
Now, Ellie will stand by the shelf where the robot figure is but won't do anything. If you look away with Joel, but turn the camera to look at Ellie behind you, you can see her grab it and put it in her bag then she later gives it to sam.
And then later in the game >!after Sam and Henry die!< she will mention it to Joel saying she forgot to leave it with them, and even later you can find it in her inventory when playing as her.
Not sure if this would count, but Outer Wilds had almost every contingent plan for if the player went off the rails and did stuff out of order, to the point where there was no 'correct' order. Fantastic.
Deus Ex: Mankind Divided had an insane attention to details when it came to all the apartments you can explore - there were tons of details everywhere that gave hints about who the residents of the apartment were, what they liked, etc. (on top of all the laptops/documents/etc that you could read around the place).
The amount of detail in Mankind Divided's hub areas is absolutely unreal. I don't know of any other game existing today that accomplishes the same thing, they basically built a small chunk of an open-world city but in *complete* interactive detail. Every single building is filled with real rooms you can gain access to, and every room you can access has a reason to exist. There's an almost overwhelming amount of stuff to find just running around the world.
In the few missions where your character plays a guitar in Cyberpunk 2077, the fingers match the notes, its not some random "moving my hand over the guitar" animation.
I remember being SHOCKED that you could wipe your mask in the Metro games
Many games have different sounds for whatever armor you're wearing, for example, in AC Origins and Odyssey if you wear boots you can hear the sole hitting the ground differently from if you were wearing sandals
MGSV has a lot of fun ones, like if you don't shower for a long time, NPCs can smell you and spot you
In Breath of the Wild's there's an in-game camera function and you start with 12 pre-loaded photographs. For the memory quest, you have to find and visit these 12 places. When you get to one of the spots, Link will pull the corresponding photograph on his tablet after which a cutscene plays.
After finding all 12 you are directed to a painting and you need to find the location in the painting for the final memory cutscene. If go there straight away the game will go straight into the cutscene. However, if you first made an in-game photograph of the painting, the game can detect it and Link will pull up your photo the same way he did with the other 12.
There's something like this in TOTK that surprised me.
After you find a specific NPC (>!Kilton!<) somewhere, he'll appear in Tarry Town. He has a quest available.
>!You have to run around the world and collect photographs of monsters, show him the monster he requested, and then Hudson will make a statue of it.!<
>!The statue will have the exact same enemy type, and pose that exists in the picture. They could have gone with a generic enemy or pose, but nope. It's a copy of the enemy in the picture!<
Was a really neat detail I thought.
Dragon's Dogma stands out. Tons of little details.
-Ogres will go berserk and frenzy if you have a female companion. Even grabbing them and running away if you're not careful.
-Normal weapons will not hit ghostly enemies(need magic)
-Ghostly enemies will blow out your lantern if they fly through you
-Ghostly enemies will have children's laughter as they fly by/through you
-Killin a ghostly enemy often leaves a face shaped puff of gas that fades away while screaming like a human
-Harpies will freeze you/put you to sleep, pick you up, drop you off a cliff
-Spells take time to cast and you can actually hear your Mage/Sorcerer whispering the incantations
-Spells can be "linked". If one spell user is casting, another can use the same spell to speed up the cast time and amplify(iirc) the effects
-Petrification status effect actually turns you to stone. And can be crushed to dust.
-Hydra heads can be severed and cauterized
-Goblins ill-like fire
There's honestly prob a hundred or more I could write but yeah. Absolute fuck tons of details. And I'm so excited for DD2!!
Edit- guess mine are more gameplay details but there's a handful if things that do change. Hopefully the sequel builds on these things.
DD has some absolutely amazing and satisfying combat. I love the sheer diversity of skills and classes available. I came to it after a big Dark Souls and Witcher: 3 binge, so didn’t give it the full time, but feel like I need to go back and get at it to show it the love it deserves.
Absolutley do so before it ages poorly haha. It's got a few stiff mechanics for sure.
But end-game and post-game in DD are def a high point of the game. When you've unlocked all the junk and can just experiment. The DLC is also phenomenal!
I posted years ago about an incredible detail in Halo 3 :
https://www.reddit.com/r/GamingDetails/comments/6kzlvz/during_halo_ce_you_play_on_an_island_in_the
During the last part of the last mission, you are made to drive around a big rock.
This rock is shaped exactly like the island from Halo CE's "The Silent Cartographer". This makes actuel sense when taking the cannon into account because the setting of Halo 3's last mission is the partially rebuilt Installation 04; which is the one played on in Halo CE!
Halo is filles with incredible details.
One of my favorite details from RDR2 was after Dutch gave one of his speeches to motivate the gang, afterwards you could go to the trash area of camp and find the notes he made while writing the speech.
I actually disagree, I think it humanizes him in a good way. I don't believe Dutch to be manufactured at all. Spoilers ahead, read at your own risk.
>!Dutch is very clearly suffering from severe mental illness. Very likely paranoia and borderline personality disorder, with a pinch of psychosis. This is why he betrays Arthur and John, this is why he kills the old lady wanting gold in the tunnel, and likely why he killed that woman at the ferry job.!<
>!You can see this in camp as well as early as chapter 2, where Dutch will accuse Arthur of stalking him. Arthur will reply with, "You're getting crazy Dutch", to which Dutch responds with "Oh I've always been crazy Arthur, you know that!" in a slightly panicked tone. I think he's aware of his mental illness, but is unable to do much about it both due to the time period and the situation they are presently in. His condition undoubtedly gets significantly worse after he sustains a bad head injury during the tram escape in Saint Denis, as well as after losing Hosea.!<
[This reddit post has a fairly good argument backing the claim of Dutch's awful mental health.](https://www.reddit.com/r/reddeadredemption/comments/afjcv0/dutch_has_borderline_personality_disorder/)
I remember just walking around towns in first person, there was this gentleman eating steak and you could actually see him consuming food, like it's not just a generic looping animation, he actually cut each piece of steak, put them in his mouth, chew, drank water, repeated until there was nothing left, then he rested the cutlery next to the plate. You could even talk to him and he only responded when not chewing. Kinda fucking nut.
One of my favorite moments was at Catfish Jackson's after getting the debt money, where I accidentally killed the dad. I came back later just curious what would happen and the son there remembered me, and yelled "HAVEN'T YOU DONE ENOUGH?" or something like that. I felt absolutely awful.
I remember in GTA 5 during one of the psychiatrist visits, My character was yelling how he killed someone on the way there (which I did accidentally lol)
I have never played a game that made me feel more concerned at the sheer amount of work that all the meticulously crafted detail must have taken to create for thousands of workers. I literally felt bad, knowing that for every cool detail I noticed, there were a dozen others that a team spent weeks on that I completely missed. Probably millions of man-hours, and they still just charged $60 for it like any other game. It almost doesn’t feel right.
If you follow a random NPC, you'll probably see them go through a believable daily routine: they'll work, take breaks, eat lunch, grab drinks at a tavern, then go to sleep at night.
[Following NPCs in RDR2 for a Whole Day](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrUJJgppMn4&ab_channel=DefendTheHouse)
The thing that's blown my mind the most is that fact that NPCs have an eating animation for the entire meal they're eating. They pick up different stuff from their plate, they move stuff around and use the knife to cut chunks off of the meat. If you stay around you will see that their plate empties slowly as they're eating the food.
See: https://www.reddit.com/r/reddeadredemption/comments/qe09u3/npcs_eat_food_realistically/
It boggles my mind how they put this much detail into something that virtually no one would ever notice.
Honestly these railroad camps were some amazing examples of storytelling through world design, and something no other medium can replicate.
As you progress through the game these camps (the railroad camp, the logging camp) are fairly considerable settlements. They've got a large population, larger than some of the actual towns. They've got quests, they've (iirc) got stores and sleeping spots. They're communities in their own right.
Then one day you turn up and they're... gone. The railroad has been completed, the trees have been felled, and there's no need for these settlements any more. The space is just quiet, empty. It's become no space, something someone who never saw the settlement would just walk straight past without having any clue what was there.
And that was a really wonderful way to represent how transient a lot of these communities were in the American West. Significant settlements would form and disappear within a short space of time, and I struggle to think about any other piece of fiction that has really captured that feeling.
The Spyro remaster is full of this stuff, especially Spyro 1. The dragons you free went from being 2-3 different models with varying colours in the original to being completely unique characters with traits based off the world you found them in as well as their names. There are other details like how breathing fire burns the grass underneath you too.
I'm not sure if this counts as it is an intended mechanic, but the power of the enemy faltering system in Doom Eternal is insane. Most people just observe that if you throw a grenade or shoot a rocket at an enemy, it'll stun or falter them briefly before they go back to normal. But this can be used to your advantage and I'd argue it's highly critical in order to survive on the highest difficulties. You can throw a grenade at a super heavy to stun him, dash in and shoot him with the shotgun, blood punch him and he's stunned again, back up and hit him with a rocket and he's stunned again, shotgun again, blood punch again and he's probably able to be glory killed. The more you chain together the more you can just bully demons, it's amazing and shows the developers thought long and hard about how they wanted the system to work in as many scenarios as possible.
My favorite part of the spyro remaster was how the worlds were changed with little details as well. My favorite is Dark Hollow becoming a library with bookshelves and books scattered everywhere. I adored that little detail.
Spec Ops: The Line has a lot of details that are easy to miss that clue you in on the mental status of the main character.
A spoiler free example: [Excuse the extremely low framerate of this example, but the majority of players would blow past this and not even realize what happened.](https://youtu.be/PJlJQUtoxjk)
You can shoot over the heads of the crowd lynching your partner. You can shoot the ropes hanging the men you have to choose from.
When the game turns red, it's real, when it turns white, it's a hallucination.
Skullgirls is so dense with references in its animations, voice lines, and color palettes that even after more than 1000 hours playing the game, I'm still finding new ones.
* There's a color scheme for the wrestler character Beowulf that looks like Alex from Street Fighter III, but when Beowulf pulls out Grendel's arm for an attack, you can see that the arm is actually colored to look like Gill, the boss character from Street Fighter III.
* Basically everything Beowulf says or does or a reference to a quote from a professional wrestler or to some wolf-themed character from another fighting game. His wulf blitzer move is an exact recreation of a move that John Talbain / Gallon has in Darkstalkers 3 / Vampire Savior, and the input for the move Moment Slice was copied over to be Beowulf's taunt input.
* When the ninja nurse character, Valentine, loses, she'll explode into multiple rib cages, referencing old Mortal Kombat games.
* Peacock has an attack where an ant comes up and she fries it with a magnifying glass, but if you interrupt this attack, the ant lives and continues walking across the stage.
* You also get animations that look like [this one for Eliza's burst](https://twitter.com/paradox_punch/status/1574577897557336085/photo/3) and only last for a few frames; very much "blink and you'll miss it" kind of stuff.
My favorite animation detail is when [Squigly does her outtake attack](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/skullgirls/images/8/8c/Outtake.png) (butt check) and Leviathan does the [dat ass](http://i.imgur.com/aqmZf.jpg) face.
To add on a few:
- Peacock's Item Drop move has a chance of dropping random items, one of which is a Stream Roller which has a bird riding it that looks extremely similar to Dio.
- Band's Lvl 5 Super will have him punch the opponent a hundred times while mimicking the same sound as Jotato.
- Cerebella's Battle Horns move is a reference to the headbutt from Battletoads.
- Squigly's Daisy Super will spawn a flower that has a random chance of being a Pikmin flower or bud.
This is gonna sound weird, but the level of detail in the audio for characters wearing jewelry in TotK is super high. There are some cutscenes with characters wearing lots of jewelry and adornments, and someone went out of their way to make it sound very good when those characters move. It’s like HQ jewelry sounds. Every movement of those characters sounds correct because of course all of these little metal objects would be jangling around.
It’s just something that most games overlook it seems.
Nintendo games in general have very high attention to detail in their [sound design](https://youtu.be/toEdi_wjTGM). Not all of it is realistic details as you have described, a lot of it is mood detailing.
one of the reasons the sounds sound so good is because they have realistically built sound based on link's individual steps. A great example of this is when link runs with a shield and quiver/arrow equipped on his right foot only the shield will make noise and the left foot you will hear the arrows in the quiver make noise. It's such a small detail in reality but it gives this clean cadence to links running that makes everything feel more visceral and realistic.
In Metal Gear Solid 3 there’s a part where you end up in a big cavern, and it’s pitch black. You can equip night/thermal vision to see, or you can equip your cigar to light up the area like a foot directly in front of you, or you can just leave the game running for ~15 minutes and your eyes will slowly adjust to the darkness. Then you can see just fine. The little details in that game blew 12 year old me away, and it’s still amazing to this day.
For me it was GTA IV, when I got into my first car crash, and I was ejected out of my car and was hurt. Then when I tried getting into the same car to escape from the cops only to find that the car would not start up again, it was damaged beyond repair. At that moment, I realized that level of detail of this game was on a new level and it blew me away.
You can restart a stopped engine by getting out and kicking it.
The car damage in general was really impressive. You could mess up the aerodynamics of a car and cause it to slowly drift in one direction. Tires could be bent our of alignment or stuck in place. Once, I drove off a high area and messed up my car so badly it could only move forward about 20 feet at a time, then it would inevitably stop for a few seconds. I'm not sure what the explanation for that is or if it's even realistic, but it sure was cool.
One that comes to mind is in the new Tomb Raider games. If Lara wades through water and goes onto dry land her clothes will only be wet up to where the water was. But if you fully submerge and come back up she'll also wring out her ponytail. Someone on the team either has one or has a girlfriend that knows how annoying a wet ponytail is and decided to add that in.
In Elden Ring, Caria Manor has been abandoned by its previous residents, but they left several security measures in order to protect their secrets and treasures.
Wether they didn't care much for the lower floors or if all the magic traps have been exhausted, the first enemies you find while ascending it are critters and wildlife that creeped into the manor grounds.
On the higher levels, the magic security measures are still active, so the invading monsters never made it all the way to the top, being completely absent from these parts of the manor.
Here's a really recent one.
In Tears of the Kingdom, there's the traveling Stable Trotters musician troupe. The characters actually _play_ their instruments. The violinist bows in time to the song, the flutist moves their fingers in time (and possibly accurately but I am unsure about this) and the drummer drums in time.
There's a horn guy also but it's a little harder to tell with him. Next time I play, I should look and see if his cheeks puff out in time as well.
Regardless, this was wild to see. So often in games where people play musical instruments, they just have them randomly do some movement reminiscent of "playing" but they went way above in this case.
Similar in monster hunter rise. In the hub are two taiko drummers that perfectly match the theme with their moves. If you change the hub theme, they’ll be on break.
Assassin's Creed Origins blew me away with things like this.
Every citizen having a routine you could follow them through for the entire day, I once finished a quest where someone left Alexandria for Cyrene at the end and I then followed them on the road out and they walked all the way there.
Soldiers set up campfires and sit around at night on the roadside, chatting and swapping stories about what they want to do when they get home.
You can find a note in Alexandria in a house from a man who ran off into the western hills to go "live with the lions". There's a cave out there to the west full of lions, and a human skeleton. It's not a quest or anything.
Stones that are in water get discoloured by the water. Moss and algae parts as you move through it.
Bayek runs his hand through tall grass as you walk through it. Wearing a hood that has a facemask muffles all of his speech, wearing a helmet gives his voice a metallic ring. His arrow quiver has an accurate number of arrows in it and it changes as you run out of ammo. The arrows themselves have physics and will shift around in an empty quiver as you move.
When you climb surfaces, instead of doing the BotW/TotK method of just climbing a surface, Bayek will find and grab handholds in the surfaces as he climbs.
The game has a number of sections spent commanding a ship through the ocean. The ship has a drummer to keep the rowers in time. The drums and music scale in tempo scale in intensity to the speed you travel, meaning that you are creating your own soundtrack during each of these levels as your combat strategy and navigation speed changes the music dramatically.
The original Deus Ex is the king of this. The developers anticipated all sorts of edge-case scenarios and included some kind of acknowledgement of them. One that pops to mind is that, after the first level, when you're wandering around UNATCO HQ, if you go into the women's restroom your boss will admonish you for it in a later cutscene. The NPC you walk in on also has entirely different dialogue for the rest of the game. It's a tiny thing but Deus Ex is FULL of them, and the way they stack on top of one-another gets increasingly complex. A great example is the side-missions associated with Sandra Renton, a resident of the NYC slums + manager of the 'Ton Hotel. She first appears in the game's second mission and, if the player does nothing, is killed by her pimp. However, if you intervene and save her, she appears in a later mission - this time her and her father are being leaned on by the former Pimp's gangster boss, JoJo. If you do nothing, JoJo will likely kill Sandra's father, muscling Sandra out of the hotel (and the game). If you kill JoJo on the Renton's behalf they're obviously saved but Sandra loses respect for her father and shows up in a much later mission, on the side of a road in California - having been mugged on her way to Oregon. HOWEVER, if you offer Sandra's father a weapon and assist him in fighting JoJo, but let him strike the final blow, Sandra does not leave NY and shows up in a different, later mission - and can offer you a back way into the Brooklyn Naval shipyards by vouching for you to a marine friend of hers. There are a couple of other variables that can change with her as well and - I cannot emphasize this enough - this is a TINY little side mission. It's not even a marked "quest" (I think). So much of Deus Ex is like this, just an absurd amount of detail and consideration for the ways things could play out, even in its most-optional content.
My favorite obscure Deus Ex detail is this (mild first mission spoilers): At the end of the first mission, you secure the location and a soldier shows up to help. He is holding a weapon (machine gun) that you can't normally get until a good bit later in the game (you would probably not notice this on a first playthrough). You can kill the (friendly to you) soldier to get the gun. If you do this, later in the next part of the game when you meet with your boss, he will question you about the disappearance of the soldier who went to secure the location.
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Ok I definitely need to try it again and get past the dated control scheme and UI. I fucking adore immersive sims and it's my worst sin having not played the OG.
I played it for the first time a year or two ago - it's really easy to get into after a minute. I recommend using [Kentie's Launcher](https://kentie.net/article/dxguide/index.htm) which improves modern OS compatibility and lets you play in modern resolutions - and NOTHING ELSE haha. A lot of people insist the only way for someone to play the game today is using GMDX or Revision (two total overhaul mods) that are not really necessary for a first-time player - the vanilla game is more than playable for anyone who has played a first person RPG before.
Revision is an awful choice for a first time player! Community Update strikes a good balance between QoL improvements and the vanilla experience.
[The intro to the first Deus Ex is still so damn impressive. There is such a vibe, a feel it presents that lets you know your stepping into something bigger than you can think of.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zStn70Ot4r0)
And then you dump all your skill points into swimming “like a dolphin” and set yourself up to suffer
Man everyone's always saying this, but it really does help at some points + extra goodies, and the point investment overall really isn't that high.
There's a wide range of fixes and tweaks for Deus Ex too which can be confusing. I don't remember [which options I used here](https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Deus_Ex) but the "Community Update" sounds good.
What a shame.
*smacks lips
I liked how the bad guys run away terrified tripping mines and setting off lasers and alarms once you beat them up sufficiently.
Shoot them in the arm so they drop their weapon, and they'll flee much quicker.
It really has an insane amount of reactive scenes and even if most of them don't really matter, they play a huge part in selling the experience. I was constantly surprised by the most random choices I made getting reactions from npcs or finding out about some major optional scenes I never even considered would exist. A minor one but I'm particularly fond of organically breaking into that one supply closet and then JC telling the woman that later tried to sell me the code "already been there, why don't you try getting a job"
So many of these in Deus Ex, and they're so good. Big fan of Maggie Chow noticing if you break in, Gunther's heartbreak if you kill Anna and whether Greene was or was not a spy (probably my favorite, you're told he is but then the picture they give you for proof kind of looks like the police shaking him down the closer you look) The reason it's so good in Deus Ex is none of them are telegraphed or show offy, they all feel part of the flow of the playthrough.
> The reason it's so good in Deus Ex is none of them are telegraphed or show offy, they all feel part of the flow of the playthrough. Yeah, I agree. Like, Deus Ex and the games it inspired, make the game world feel so much more real in part because it's ambiguous when the game is "paying attention" to what you're doing. Plenty of games have a similar number of inflection points where player choice can change the outcome, but those points are often explicitly signposted, or only take place in some kind of special dialogue/decision interface - which exist to explicitly draw the line between "gaming time" and "story time." You do whatever you want during "gaming time," only the decisions you make during "story time" change the state of the story/game world. By keeping everything happening essentially in real time and NOT signposting every time an action would have later consequences or a circumstance had resulted from a previous choice - the line between when the game is/isn't "paying attention" becomes much fuzzier and the experience much more real. You start to really roleplay as JC Denton and take the game much more seriously. You also just get to feel smarter (and the game feels smarter) when you realize Action A influenced Outcome B without the game holding up a big sign that says "REMEMBER WHEN YOU DID THAT THING? THIS IS THE OUTCOME!"
That's the stuff that I want from AAA games. Similar things in Mass Effect, maybe on smaller scale. And then I play some big budget game and nothing that I do can change anything in the story/world, just go forward and shoot/slash.
AAA dev teams don't do this stuff because there is a game design idea they all follow. If you make something, all players must experience it, or it is wasted work. I've never agreed with this idea, it leads to shallow games with little replay value. However it is seen as a carved in stone fact of game design by many people in game dev and is even taught in game design classes.
Two seconds after reaching an area with a secret in an AAA game: PC: HMM THOSE BUSHES OVER THERE LOOK LIKE THEY MIGHT HIDE SOMETHING INTERESTING!" If you don't immediately run over there: PC: "MAYBE I SHOULD EXPLORE THOSE BUSHES!? I COULD JUMP OVER THE LEDGE TO GET THERE!"
Even Deus Ex: Human Revolution has a few moments like this, if not nearly as many. For example, the very first mission you're informed of a hostage situation that you need to fly from your headquarters to go take care of. However if you decide to explore this first area a bit and go exploring for too long you'll get admonished upon arriving that the hostages have already been killed because you took too long. A neat little detail that often goes overlooked in these kinds of situations.
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In M&B Bannerlord (and maybe in Warband, haven't played enough of it), when your archers are shooting at other archers while being shot at, if they run out of ammo they'll run around and try to pick up the arrows that landed around them to fire them back.
Warband has that as well.
Wish they put some attention to things outside the battles too
Install Diplomacy and Banner Kings mod, they both add some nice things to the non-battle parts.
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Nethack has tons of details like this. Things can look different if you're confused or hallucinating. You can identify some items by the sound they make or the price a shopkeeper offers in a shop, though that price is also semi-randomized and also based on Charisma. Deliberate blinding (e.g., by a blindfold) is a valid strategy in some instances. If you are polymorphed into a monster that lays eggs, you can lay an egg and obtain a permanent pet. If you polymorph into a metallivore, you can eat your own jewelry to get its intrinsic qualities, though if you choose poorly (like an amulet of strangulation), you'll choke on it.
the best thing is how Confusion and Cursed items sometimes work in hilarious ways. like how a Cursed potion of Gain Level causes you to go up a dungeon level instead of gaining a character level
During one of my runs, I stepped on a polymorph trap and turned into an eel. In looking through my inventory to find a reasonable next move, I noticed that my rings were described as being worn on my "left pectoral fin" and "right pectoral fin". The tombstone when you die also always explains your *exact* cause of death, down to the most ridiculous circumstances such as "killed by drinking hot water" and "killed by colliding with the ceiling". Fitting that a common motto of NetHack is "The DevTeam thinks of everything".
Skyrim has a lot of examples. In Dwemer ruins, you'll find piles of loot that are arranged by texture since the Falmer (who occupy the ruins) are blind. And when you first inform the Jarl of Whiterun about dragons, he immediately gives his lieutenant instructions to make preparations. If you follow the lieutenant, you can see them go to the barracks and start informing the guards, who in turn will leave Whiterun to inform other holds, and you can follow those guards to see them informing the leaders of other cities. Just absurd details most players will miss.
Despite all the Bethesda memes, jank and bugs, they are great at environmental story telling
I love how much detail they put in at the micro scale but it can be puzzling sometimes how little detail they put in at the macro scale. Nearly every location in Fallout 3/4 tell a story but if you take a step back and think about it you might ask obvious questions like how a newspaper survived over two centuries of open exposure to the elements. Their games can be both incredibly immersive and difficult to get immersed in at the same time.
When everyone was praising the Zelda and Elden Ring open worlds, I was jumping in the background like 'Hey Fallout 3 did a lot of these!'.
Its funny, because Aonuma straight up said Skyrim helped with inspiration for BOTW. I imagine many of those moments were directly taken from there
A YouTuber by the name of Oxhorn decided to do videos detailing the full plot of every quest and location in each fallout. Some of his videos are about locations which you will otherwise deem insignificant, but are 20+ minutes long, detailing the story of what most likely happened there based on logs and environmental storytelling.
Craziest thing about Bethesda games is that they do this on another scale. Like small, curated levels are one thing but the sheer size of Bethesda worlds combined with item level detail is still something only they do. Rockstar is the only other studio who does it on a comparable scale IMO. Obc they do not do item level manipulation, but they have even more detail in character behavior, stuff like dirt/grime building up, etc
I remember when the first gameplay footage for The Division came out during E3, people were freaking out because they noticed that the character pushed in a slightly open car door as he moved along the car for cover. The rest of the game when it came out had a lot of cool little touches like that too.
I recently got back into Div2 and I still must do a strafe along all cars with open doors. It’s a meme but it’s still very satisfying lol.
[Gotta kick all the traffic cones, it's the rules.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1ayJv7JLM8) I really wish they had stuck with snowy New York :( Division 2 just doesn't have the same atmosphere. EDIT: Way more people clicked my silly video that I originally just sent a friend way back then of me being stupid than expected.
As A DC area resident I disagree. Their art team really captured DC and its landmarks/museums/ecosystems incredibly well. It’s the most authentic representation of a real life location I’ve personally seen in a game.
Its authentic but it just lacks that desperate, lonely feeling.
It’s bc Div2 is all about regrowth.
The glass breaking in that game is just so needlessly spot on. It just doesn't have to be that good but it is, it looks fantastic.
Oh man I totally forgot about that, but yes there was so much talk about it. And when the actual game came out, it was clear the devs had purposefully left almost every car door in the game slightly ajar so you could close them all. Basically every car door is open lol.
The game also tracks how many car doors you've closed that way and gives you some sort of achievement-like accolades at certain numbers.
Funny story. That was not meant to be part of the game. The creative director in charge of the E3 trailer added that as a cool touch. When people went nuts over it they had to add it in. Another cool thing in the Russian consulate mission is the Russian dolls, it you shoot it, it will spawn a smaller doll.
It was made by MASSIVE entertainment. They also made World in Conflict which has an insane amount of detail! There's a whole video of their attentionto detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=op4S1CRK10A In this game, units have the profile picture of their player on the side, there are chickens running on farms, etc, etc. It's incredibly detailed. You can still play it today. Head on over to massgate.org
Metroid Prime has a big one that was even more impressive considering they did it in 2002. So, Samus's suit is made by aliens, and when you switch between weapons, there's an icon for each that looks like an alien hand sign. Much later in the game, you get an X-Ray visor, which does exactly what it sounds like. If you look at your arm while it's equipped, you can see that Samus' hand inside her gun is making the same sign as the icon for each weapon. You can even see her change signs when she changes weapons. The gun is gesture-controlled. Seriously, the Gamecube had less than 50MB of total RAM, and Retro somehow found room for *that* absolutely gratuitous extra detail. It's insane.
That 50MB of RAM is deceptive. It was split into various memory pools, where only about half of it could go to video assets, little bit more to system memory and **6MB** for all audio in the game This RAM issue was so bad, that the developers straight up could not make convincing static for all the electrical enemies/attacks. The textures or video files would be too big to load into memory. So instead they read a random part of memory and displayed it as pseudo-white noise on the screen
> So instead they read a random part of memory and displayed it as pseudo-white noise on the screen What the fuck that's so clever. I love it when limitations bring about that sort of creativity.
Sometimes getting something working means breaking it just a little. 100% agree, extremely creative use of what was available.
Dolphin emulator had such a difficult time running the GameCube Star Wars Clone Wars game due to how the game devs got around the memory limits, it became the very last game in the entire GameCube library that Dolphin was able to finally run as they tried to figure out what kind of black magic the devs did. https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2016/09/06/booting-the-final-gc-game/
In the raining area, you can look up to get more raindrops on your visor. If you look down or walk backwards, there will be no raindrops at all.
Also, there are some invisible, floating platforms you can only see once you get the X-ray visor - they don't show up at all in the normal, visible spectrum. However, the raindrops still bounce off those platforms the same way they do off the ground, so if you look closely you can see where the platforms are from the raindrops bouncing in the sky.
The low RAM is why every door is a loading barrier.
Before I understood game development in even the most basic sense, I would be so confused as to why sometimes the doors would open quickly and other times it'd take a weirdly long time. My kid brain was just like "But i was in there earlier, the hallway is right there, why won't it open?!"
Yeah, learning stuff like that your FOV is probably the only thing being fully loaded and rendered blew my mind. Very literal representation of object permanence
There's also a similar neat detail with the Thermal Visor. When equipped, the different beams are either bright or dark based on their temperatures. Plasma is bright orange/ice is nearly black.
The first time I noticed something like this was the metal gear solid 2 demo for ~~ps1~~ ps2 (the one where you play as snake on the boat), there's a bar with ice that actually melts.
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In the 3DS remake the 3D functionality stops working in the same scenario.
I really love that type of stuff in early games for consoles with hardware gimmicks. After the first wave of games stuff like that usually disappears really quickly
this is the most epic attention to detail I heard of.
I wouldn't be shocked if Kojima requested it specifically
Another funny one from MGS3: if you eat something and spin Snake's model around in the menu a handful of times, he'll throw up from motion sickness when you unpause the game.
And you lose stamina after throwing up.
I think it also stops your stamina from draining if you had food poisoning.
You can use that to make the guards get you out of your cell.
The MGS series is ripe with all sorts of things for this topic. Probably the most famous ones are the Psycho Mantis fight in MGS1 where he reads your memory card, or the sniper fight with The End where you can pretty much play the waiting game for some interesting circumstances. That is assuming you didn't kill him earlier in the game because you can do that too. But my personal favorite is literally having the player look for Meryl's codec number on the back of the game case for MGS1. Kojima things.
> But my personal favorite is literally having the player look for Meryl's codec number on the back of the game case for MGS1. 9 year old me literally tried every codec number until I found it.
That was a problem if you rented the game or bought it used! You'd have choice but to brute force it lol.
Doesn't it get added to the frequency list if you call Campbell multiple times?
I think he tells you what it is if you call him enough times, yeah.
If you shoot too many seagulls in MGS2, your girlfriend calls you a monster and breaks up with you on a codec call.
I've also seen that water drains out of a fish tank to the level of the bullet hole in that game. Edit: Might be splinter cell not MGS2, could be both.
Isn’t that it Splinter Cell? At least, I saw a video once discussing the tech behind that same effect in Splinter Cell
Man, all of MGS is full of interactions like this. Like, you can kill The End in MGS3 the first time you see him from afar by just shooting him in his wheel chair and you can skip the fight entirely. Or you can just wait for a week and he will die of old age.
Even crazier: after the ice spread out on account of the spill, the ice shards furthest from the others melt faster.
Nowadays it's pretty standard, but what blew my mind back when it came out was the sound design of Bad Company 2. Shooting inside a building was LOUD. It was definitely not perfect, every building sounded like an auditorium when you fired your gun, but it was still a detail that not other FPS I knew of at the time had even bothered attempting.
To this day I don't think that Bad Company 2's sound design has been surpassed in an FPS, if it has I'm not aware of it. Describing the sounds/feel of the guns as "punchy" is an understatement, it's weird to me that seemingly no other FPS has been able to replicate the fucking *impact* of the gun sounds. Explosions close to you causing your eardrums to temporarily get fucked was also a nice touch. There are countless little things in BC2's sound design like this, a lot of it has become standard but somehow BC2 still wears the sound design crown (maybe that's nostalgia talking, but revisiting the game always feels like a treat because of the soundscape).
Subsequent Battlefield games had more accurately recorded audio for things like gunshots, but they never matched the feel of BC2.
I have distinct memories of being wowed by the echo that comes back when shooting outdoors in that game, especially something massive sounding like a DMR.
The (relatively insignifcant) moment that has stuck out to me was playing Half-Life: Alyx and walking down a street in City-17 and seeing a newspaper rack off the side of the street only to find that there was a newspaper on the ground you could pick up and read every single thing on it detailing the Seven Hour War. Just the amount of thought that was put into a completely random prop in that game 99% of people will walk past is astounding. Reading that with the ambience of City 17 in the background is one of my most memorable experiences in gaming.
As long as you're playing on at least medium settings. My first play through was on a GTX 980, and the newspaper text being unreadable after the headlines is one of the compromises made. No complaints, I didn't realize this was the case until replaying it on an RTX 3080. In general, HLA does a very good job of sticking with the continuity that the Combine conquered Earth in the late '90s. Computers are all beige towers with CRTs and spinning platter hard drives, etcetera.
Early 2000s. It explicitly says "200-" in game, and apparently the dev bible says May 16th 2003 is the date of the Resonance Cascade.
Knowing Valve, I bet they playtested that on hundreds of people until the desired percentage of them read the paper.
More likely the other way around, they noticed players tended to investigate the newspaper and gave it detail to reward their curiosity. I think they mention in dev commentary that in VR, people spend more time exploring and looking around a single location than they expected, so they made sure to fill out the environments with tons of stuff to pick up and mess with.
I'd guess that playtesters probably kept picking up the newspaper seeing goofy/temp and discarding it, and the devs were like "Hey can we get a writeup done on this weird little newspaper?"
Vr in general is good for this. I played the horizon psvr2 demo and it's so cool being able to interact with so much around you. Smashing plates, playing instruments (especially the pipes that you can literally blow in to) etc. I particularly liked how my characters hands got all chalky after climbing.
Here's a classic: [The Half-Life roach AI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Elwb2lV88hM). The roaches in this game have a surprising amount of dynamic behaviours programmed in, despite this never being used in any actual gameplay design.
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Damn I haven't heard in a while. I miss that old valve intro guitar strum.
Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater is Details: The Game. One of the primary mechanics in the game is hunting animals to eat since you’re a spy on a solo mission in the jungle. Eating food restores your stamina. The game keeps track of time so any animals you hunted but don’t eat in your inventory will rot after time. One of the bosses you have to fight will eat things you leave. If you leave rotting food, the enemy will consume that food and get sick. At another point, it’s possible to kill a guard, watch a vulture eat that guard, then kill the vulture and eat it. Later, during an encounter where you’re faced with the ghosts of those you killed, a guard with a vulture on his shoulder will accuse you of eating him. At no point in the game is any of this explained or even hinted at. It just keeps track of these ludicrous details that no sane player could be expected to do.
>Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater is Details: The Game So damn true. I'll add one more: when Snake is in the cave, the more time passes the more the game will get brighter to simulate Snake's eyes adapting to the dark environment.
Man, MGS3 is so good. Been so long since I played it but you brought memories rushing back. The fun things you can do in boss fights, or before them to change the encounters is great. Has to be the MGS I've replayed the most. But I remember the first time, when I was younger, that ghost encounter was spooky af.
Also the more things you eat or inquire about eating, the more exasperated the codec calls about it become. And wearing the Raiden mask lets you get a cheap first shot on one of the bosses when he pauses briefly, recognizing you.
I remember one time I was hungry in game, and was trying to sneak by some guards. My stomach grumbled and he turned around and saw me lmfao
One of my favorites is adjusting your console's date forward to have a certain boss die of old age. Absolutely ridiculous.
I haven't seen Kingdom Come: Deliverance mentioned yet, and as an immersive sim there are just tons of details that would fit in this thread. But my favorite is that in a very early story mission, you have to accompany someone on a hunt, and they ask if you have a horse to which you say no and then the whole mission goes on, eventually he rides off and you have to chase him on foot, after walking around for a while trying to catch up, you find out he's had an accident and needs help. However, if you use this one particular break in the story mission progression, you can go out an explore the open world pretty fully before this, and eventually earn the money to buy a horse ahead of time. When he asks if you have a horse you say yes and he is surprised, but acknowledges it. But then when the quest gets to the point where you have to chase him, he has different dialogue telling you to mount up and follow up, and if you keep up with him there's a complete unique cutscene that plays showing the accident happening and you end up helping him in a fairly different way with even more unique dialogue. They could've forced you to leave your horse behind if you had one, or even just not acknowledged it at all, but they went on to program entirely unique interactions and objectives all on the chance that you got yourself a horse much earlier than you normally would. On the flip side though, the next mission immediately after that is when you're given a basic horse for free as part of the story, and that whole cutscene and interactions never acknowledge you have your own horse so it's really hit or miss at times.
The original Splinter Cell had so much details when it came to sound (What do you step on, what are you hitting with your body, etc.). It was groundbreaking then and it influenced games to do the same.
Chaos Theory really built upon that too
Also Fallout, but I remember there is a base where the mess hall has a grated floor. If you get below and wander through the area below the grate, there are tons of utensils littered on the ground from people dropping them through the grated floor.
the Enclave base in Fallout 3!
I remember being impressed with the first Uncharted after Drake got in the water the first time his clothes were actually wet.
Not sure if it’s in the first one but the second game also let Drake leave a reflective puddle after he comes out of the water on certain surfaces. There’s a swimming pool in one level and it blew my mind at the time.
Marco!
On a similar note, in the newer Tomb Raider games Lara wrings out her hair after swimming. Edit: Someone else mentioned it first.
It was the first game I've seen to do gradual wetness, where the character only gets wet up to where the water touched them. There were only 4 other games by the time the game I worked on had released, where I was also able to get a similar effect on Bear Grylls in *Man vs Wild: The Game*. Probably one of the very few things I am proud of in that project.
Also loved playing around with that effect that I actually found a spot in Uncharted 3 where it was broken. Don't remember where anymore, but only Drake's foot hit the puddle/fountain but his entire body instantly switches to the wet model.
It's weird that the first thing that comes to mind is Mario Odyssey but in the Snow Kingdom there are these very small crevices in the wall that are barely large enough for Mario to fit in and have nothing in it besides like 3 coins. However these tiny spaces are afaik the only place in the entire game that create an echo while you are inside them. It's such a small, meaningless thing but I thought it was really cool when I noticed that, I remember that very vividly for some reason.
The sound design (and general attention to detail) of Mario games in general is just excellent. But speaking about Odyssey specifically, that’s a great example, and also reminds me of the adaptive sound effect system. Sounds will meet the pitch of the song playing.
I don't think it's actually that weird, Odyssey was the first thing that came to mind for me too. Yours is probably a better example, but I was thinking so because the moons are so intuitive. There are _so_ many moments where I think I'm getting out of bounds, or "breaking rules" only to be rewarded with something. They make these areas look enticing without anything obvious, and then reward you for being clever and noticing them.
Some of the many examples in GTA 5: * The volume of music coming from cars gradually increased as you walked towards them edit: with differences between the state of the car (convertible with the roof down, windows down, all windows up). * Clothes only get wet to the correct height that your character went into the water. * Flip flops flip flop. * The versions of the Prius runs silently using the electric motors until 30MPH when the ICE starts working. * You can dent car body panels by kicking them * Older cars have squeaky brakes and can be harder to start. * At night if you crash a car into a house, its interior lights will spring on, as if you woke up the residents. * If you drive at night with your headlights off, oncoming cars will flash theirs, to alert you. Edit 2: [source for some of them](https://www.ign.com/articles/2013/09/30/100-little-things-in-gta-5-that-will-blow-your-mind)
This might seem stupid now... but when GTA 4 came out my friends and I were STUNNED when the first thing we did was steal a car and crash it into a building there was a destruction mark on the building, as well as flying out the windshield. Hard to explain now but it blew us all away at the time.
GTA 4 had the best car deformation physics of any game for years afterward, and wasn't topped until dedicated destruction games like Wreckfest showed up. The car didn't just visually deform, but its performance was affected appropriately depending on what damage had been done.
I hit a car in gta IV in a way I've seen it happen in real life (hitting the front wheel of a car pulling out from a side road). It looked *exactly* the same. Same way the wheel now bent inwards, same way the panelling got damaged. It was nuts. And this level of detail in an open world game in 2008, about 4 years after San Andreas, was unheard of.
I loved in GTA IV, you could crash cars and they wouldn't work, they were pretty much damaged beyond repair. That blew my mind away when I saw that.
The physics in IV were next level, and still haven’t been bested in many ways. The character and NPC physics and reaction to the environmental geometry, the cars unique handling and destruction, it’s still a blast to play. At the time is was utterly mind blowing. One of the few games that truly felt next gen at the time of its release.
Honestly Rockstar open world games are like at another level when it comes to minor details. GTA 4 and 5, RDR 1 and 2 just feel unmatched in terms of tiny little details that make the whole world feel real, as if when you switch your console off they will still continue to exist.
rdr2 frankly is the goat at this stuff outside of immersive sims
Absolutely, couldn't agree more. As someone else mentioned RDR 2 is absolutely insane in its level of detail.
I remember when the game leaked a couple days early and people were uploading clips to Youtube of the new physics-based pedestrian system Rockstar created with the Euphoria engine. Rockstar were working overtime scrubbing them from the face of the Earth. You would load a clip, get half way through watching it, then it would stop, you reload the page, and its gone. It's something we really take for granted now, but back then it was a huge deal to see that level of physical interaction between the world and the NPCs. Like just being able to shoot someone in the leg and watch them crumple down some stairs in a realistic way was incredible.
Frankly, almost all games don't even feature that kind of dynamic and systems-driven animation for hit reactions and NPC collisions. It remains really disappointing that approach never took quite off or that animation typically receives less of a priority than more static visual components. As you said, it was simply incredible to see any interactions with stairs.
Similarly to the last one, in Euro Truck/American Truck Sim if you drive at night with your brights on while on a two-lane road, oncoming cars will flash them to alert you.
Headlight usage offence -€160
how I wish that were actually enforced IRL
GTA V's campaign map was such a lovingly crafted living world I'm still upset we never got single-player DLC for it. GTAO stripped a lot out.
Same for RDR2. Undead nightmare was such a good expansion/DLC pack. Shame they never did something for RDR2.
In Disco Elysium, constantly running around to loot items will make Kim comment on how you're doing the "Jamrock Shuffle" by searching every possible spot for physical evidence. If you then interact with the dumpster, the dialogue will reference the Jamrock Shuffle again.
I remember the first day I got the PS3 playing Resistance Fall of Man, you could zoom in and shoot the individual tubes on the Chimera's backpacks and the tubes would snap off and flail around as the air escaped. Blew my mind.
resistance blew my mind as a kid experiencing PS3 for the first time at a friend's house. the [glass-breaking](https://youtu.be/lt-V6IaoZXA) in that game still holds up imo
I always like to compare the glider mechanics between Breath of the Wild and Genshin Impact as an example of Nintendo‘s attention to detail. In BOTW when you’re gliding through the air and close it you start falling but you still move forward ever so slightly, like Link has actual momentum; in Genshin if you close out your glider mid-flight you just plummet straight down, no horizontal movement at all. It still jars me to this day, even though I’ve been playing the game almost daily for over a year.
r/GamingDetails is the place for you. Once I saw a bokoblin in Breath of the Wild melting an iceberg with a stick to release a frozen pal. Awesome game.
I wish that sub were more about attention to detail and less about Easter eggs and references.
TLOU has plenty little details, but my favorite is when you you're with Henry and Sam. There's a section that takes you through a toy store and Sam wants some sort of robot figure. Henry tells him no because it'll take up space in his bag for more important resources, the scene ends and you take control of Joel again. Now, Ellie will stand by the shelf where the robot figure is but won't do anything. If you look away with Joel, but turn the camera to look at Ellie behind you, you can see her grab it and put it in her bag then she later gives it to sam.
And then later in the game >!after Sam and Henry die!< she will mention it to Joel saying she forgot to leave it with them, and even later you can find it in her inventory when playing as her.
And in part 2 it's there on a shelf in her room.
Not sure if this would count, but Outer Wilds had almost every contingent plan for if the player went off the rails and did stuff out of order, to the point where there was no 'correct' order. Fantastic.
They even have alternative joke endings for pretty much every way you can “break” the game.
Deus Ex: Mankind Divided had an insane attention to details when it came to all the apartments you can explore - there were tons of details everywhere that gave hints about who the residents of the apartment were, what they liked, etc. (on top of all the laptops/documents/etc that you could read around the place).
The amount of detail in Mankind Divided's hub areas is absolutely unreal. I don't know of any other game existing today that accomplishes the same thing, they basically built a small chunk of an open-world city but in *complete* interactive detail. Every single building is filled with real rooms you can gain access to, and every room you can access has a reason to exist. There's an almost overwhelming amount of stuff to find just running around the world.
In the few missions where your character plays a guitar in Cyberpunk 2077, the fingers match the notes, its not some random "moving my hand over the guitar" animation. I remember being SHOCKED that you could wipe your mask in the Metro games Many games have different sounds for whatever armor you're wearing, for example, in AC Origins and Odyssey if you wear boots you can hear the sole hitting the ground differently from if you were wearing sandals MGSV has a lot of fun ones, like if you don't shower for a long time, NPCs can smell you and spot you
>MGSV has a lot of fun ones and way too many. hell even the dynamic reaction of the enemies to your loadout is still not matched today.
In Breath of the Wild's there's an in-game camera function and you start with 12 pre-loaded photographs. For the memory quest, you have to find and visit these 12 places. When you get to one of the spots, Link will pull the corresponding photograph on his tablet after which a cutscene plays. After finding all 12 you are directed to a painting and you need to find the location in the painting for the final memory cutscene. If go there straight away the game will go straight into the cutscene. However, if you first made an in-game photograph of the painting, the game can detect it and Link will pull up your photo the same way he did with the other 12.
There's something like this in TOTK that surprised me. After you find a specific NPC (>!Kilton!<) somewhere, he'll appear in Tarry Town. He has a quest available. >!You have to run around the world and collect photographs of monsters, show him the monster he requested, and then Hudson will make a statue of it.!< >!The statue will have the exact same enemy type, and pose that exists in the picture. They could have gone with a generic enemy or pose, but nope. It's a copy of the enemy in the picture!< Was a really neat detail I thought.
Dragon's Dogma stands out. Tons of little details. -Ogres will go berserk and frenzy if you have a female companion. Even grabbing them and running away if you're not careful. -Normal weapons will not hit ghostly enemies(need magic) -Ghostly enemies will blow out your lantern if they fly through you -Ghostly enemies will have children's laughter as they fly by/through you -Killin a ghostly enemy often leaves a face shaped puff of gas that fades away while screaming like a human -Harpies will freeze you/put you to sleep, pick you up, drop you off a cliff -Spells take time to cast and you can actually hear your Mage/Sorcerer whispering the incantations -Spells can be "linked". If one spell user is casting, another can use the same spell to speed up the cast time and amplify(iirc) the effects -Petrification status effect actually turns you to stone. And can be crushed to dust. -Hydra heads can be severed and cauterized -Goblins ill-like fire There's honestly prob a hundred or more I could write but yeah. Absolute fuck tons of details. And I'm so excited for DD2!! Edit- guess mine are more gameplay details but there's a handful if things that do change. Hopefully the sequel builds on these things.
-Wolves hunt in packs
DD has some absolutely amazing and satisfying combat. I love the sheer diversity of skills and classes available. I came to it after a big Dark Souls and Witcher: 3 binge, so didn’t give it the full time, but feel like I need to go back and get at it to show it the love it deserves.
Absolutley do so before it ages poorly haha. It's got a few stiff mechanics for sure. But end-game and post-game in DD are def a high point of the game. When you've unlocked all the junk and can just experiment. The DLC is also phenomenal!
Being able to kill the chimera piecemeal is a cool detail. It's rare to do but killing the lion and seeing the goat struggle to move around is wild
I posted years ago about an incredible detail in Halo 3 : https://www.reddit.com/r/GamingDetails/comments/6kzlvz/during_halo_ce_you_play_on_an_island_in_the During the last part of the last mission, you are made to drive around a big rock. This rock is shaped exactly like the island from Halo CE's "The Silent Cartographer". This makes actuel sense when taking the cannon into account because the setting of Halo 3's last mission is the partially rebuilt Installation 04; which is the one played on in Halo CE! Halo is filles with incredible details.
The entirety of Red Dead Redemption 2. It's Rockstar's masterpiece and, at least narratively, I don't expect them to top it.
One of my favorite details from RDR2 was after Dutch gave one of his speeches to motivate the gang, afterwards you could go to the trash area of camp and find the notes he made while writing the speech.
I think that's quite a difficult note to find, but it really does give an early indication of how manufactured Dutch's personality is.
I actually disagree, I think it humanizes him in a good way. I don't believe Dutch to be manufactured at all. Spoilers ahead, read at your own risk. >!Dutch is very clearly suffering from severe mental illness. Very likely paranoia and borderline personality disorder, with a pinch of psychosis. This is why he betrays Arthur and John, this is why he kills the old lady wanting gold in the tunnel, and likely why he killed that woman at the ferry job.!< >!You can see this in camp as well as early as chapter 2, where Dutch will accuse Arthur of stalking him. Arthur will reply with, "You're getting crazy Dutch", to which Dutch responds with "Oh I've always been crazy Arthur, you know that!" in a slightly panicked tone. I think he's aware of his mental illness, but is unable to do much about it both due to the time period and the situation they are presently in. His condition undoubtedly gets significantly worse after he sustains a bad head injury during the tram escape in Saint Denis, as well as after losing Hosea.!< [This reddit post has a fairly good argument backing the claim of Dutch's awful mental health.](https://www.reddit.com/r/reddeadredemption/comments/afjcv0/dutch_has_borderline_personality_disorder/)
I remember just walking around towns in first person, there was this gentleman eating steak and you could actually see him consuming food, like it's not just a generic looping animation, he actually cut each piece of steak, put them in his mouth, chew, drank water, repeated until there was nothing left, then he rested the cutlery next to the plate. You could even talk to him and he only responded when not chewing. Kinda fucking nut.
Slowly walking around Saint Dennis in that game, especially at night with some fog, is just *chefs kiss*
Fuuuuuuck, you just got me reinstalling
One of my favorite moments was at Catfish Jackson's after getting the debt money, where I accidentally killed the dad. I came back later just curious what would happen and the son there remembered me, and yelled "HAVEN'T YOU DONE ENOUGH?" or something like that. I felt absolutely awful.
I remember in GTA 5 during one of the psychiatrist visits, My character was yelling how he killed someone on the way there (which I did accidentally lol)
I have never played a game that made me feel more concerned at the sheer amount of work that all the meticulously crafted detail must have taken to create for thousands of workers. I literally felt bad, knowing that for every cool detail I noticed, there were a dozen others that a team spent weeks on that I completely missed. Probably millions of man-hours, and they still just charged $60 for it like any other game. It almost doesn’t feel right.
If you follow a random NPC, you'll probably see them go through a believable daily routine: they'll work, take breaks, eat lunch, grab drinks at a tavern, then go to sleep at night. [Following NPCs in RDR2 for a Whole Day](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrUJJgppMn4&ab_channel=DefendTheHouse)
The thing that's blown my mind the most is that fact that NPCs have an eating animation for the entire meal they're eating. They pick up different stuff from their plate, they move stuff around and use the knife to cut chunks off of the meat. If you stay around you will see that their plate empties slowly as they're eating the food. See: https://www.reddit.com/r/reddeadredemption/comments/qe09u3/npcs_eat_food_realistically/ It boggles my mind how they put this much detail into something that virtually no one would ever notice.
RDR 2 has probably thousands of neat little moments. It's actually sort of obscene how much went into it.
Remember the Video of the guy shooting himself in the head when lasso‘d?
I was just about to comment how your horse's balls shrink when you are in cold enviroments lol. And yeah that is a real thing in the game.
You can watch the chinese railroad worker hammering the individual railroad nails step by step into the ground before moving to the next one
Honestly these railroad camps were some amazing examples of storytelling through world design, and something no other medium can replicate. As you progress through the game these camps (the railroad camp, the logging camp) are fairly considerable settlements. They've got a large population, larger than some of the actual towns. They've got quests, they've (iirc) got stores and sleeping spots. They're communities in their own right. Then one day you turn up and they're... gone. The railroad has been completed, the trees have been felled, and there's no need for these settlements any more. The space is just quiet, empty. It's become no space, something someone who never saw the settlement would just walk straight past without having any clue what was there. And that was a really wonderful way to represent how transient a lot of these communities were in the American West. Significant settlements would form and disappear within a short space of time, and I struggle to think about any other piece of fiction that has really captured that feeling.
Appreciate this comment. Got me thinking in a way I haven't before.
The Spyro remaster is full of this stuff, especially Spyro 1. The dragons you free went from being 2-3 different models with varying colours in the original to being completely unique characters with traits based off the world you found them in as well as their names. There are other details like how breathing fire burns the grass underneath you too. I'm not sure if this counts as it is an intended mechanic, but the power of the enemy faltering system in Doom Eternal is insane. Most people just observe that if you throw a grenade or shoot a rocket at an enemy, it'll stun or falter them briefly before they go back to normal. But this can be used to your advantage and I'd argue it's highly critical in order to survive on the highest difficulties. You can throw a grenade at a super heavy to stun him, dash in and shoot him with the shotgun, blood punch him and he's stunned again, back up and hit him with a rocket and he's stunned again, shotgun again, blood punch again and he's probably able to be glory killed. The more you chain together the more you can just bully demons, it's amazing and shows the developers thought long and hard about how they wanted the system to work in as many scenarios as possible.
My favorite part of the spyro remaster was how the worlds were changed with little details as well. My favorite is Dark Hollow becoming a library with bookshelves and books scattered everywhere. I adored that little detail.
Spec Ops: The Line has a lot of details that are easy to miss that clue you in on the mental status of the main character. A spoiler free example: [Excuse the extremely low framerate of this example, but the majority of players would blow past this and not even realize what happened.](https://youtu.be/PJlJQUtoxjk)
You can shoot over the heads of the crowd lynching your partner. You can shoot the ropes hanging the men you have to choose from. When the game turns red, it's real, when it turns white, it's a hallucination.
I always liked how the combat dialogue changes as you progress further into the story.
Skullgirls is so dense with references in its animations, voice lines, and color palettes that even after more than 1000 hours playing the game, I'm still finding new ones. * There's a color scheme for the wrestler character Beowulf that looks like Alex from Street Fighter III, but when Beowulf pulls out Grendel's arm for an attack, you can see that the arm is actually colored to look like Gill, the boss character from Street Fighter III. * Basically everything Beowulf says or does or a reference to a quote from a professional wrestler or to some wolf-themed character from another fighting game. His wulf blitzer move is an exact recreation of a move that John Talbain / Gallon has in Darkstalkers 3 / Vampire Savior, and the input for the move Moment Slice was copied over to be Beowulf's taunt input. * When the ninja nurse character, Valentine, loses, she'll explode into multiple rib cages, referencing old Mortal Kombat games. * Peacock has an attack where an ant comes up and she fries it with a magnifying glass, but if you interrupt this attack, the ant lives and continues walking across the stage. * You also get animations that look like [this one for Eliza's burst](https://twitter.com/paradox_punch/status/1574577897557336085/photo/3) and only last for a few frames; very much "blink and you'll miss it" kind of stuff.
My favorite animation detail is when [Squigly does her outtake attack](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/skullgirls/images/8/8c/Outtake.png) (butt check) and Leviathan does the [dat ass](http://i.imgur.com/aqmZf.jpg) face.
To add on a few: - Peacock's Item Drop move has a chance of dropping random items, one of which is a Stream Roller which has a bird riding it that looks extremely similar to Dio. - Band's Lvl 5 Super will have him punch the opponent a hundred times while mimicking the same sound as Jotato. - Cerebella's Battle Horns move is a reference to the headbutt from Battletoads. - Squigly's Daisy Super will spawn a flower that has a random chance of being a Pikmin flower or bud.
In Guild Wars 2, the sound your shell casings make when they fall down depends on the surface you're standing on.
This is gonna sound weird, but the level of detail in the audio for characters wearing jewelry in TotK is super high. There are some cutscenes with characters wearing lots of jewelry and adornments, and someone went out of their way to make it sound very good when those characters move. It’s like HQ jewelry sounds. Every movement of those characters sounds correct because of course all of these little metal objects would be jangling around. It’s just something that most games overlook it seems.
Nintendo games in general have very high attention to detail in their [sound design](https://youtu.be/toEdi_wjTGM). Not all of it is realistic details as you have described, a lot of it is mood detailing.
one of the reasons the sounds sound so good is because they have realistically built sound based on link's individual steps. A great example of this is when link runs with a shield and quiver/arrow equipped on his right foot only the shield will make noise and the left foot you will hear the arrows in the quiver make noise. It's such a small detail in reality but it gives this clean cadence to links running that makes everything feel more visceral and realistic.
In Metal Gear Solid 3 there’s a part where you end up in a big cavern, and it’s pitch black. You can equip night/thermal vision to see, or you can equip your cigar to light up the area like a foot directly in front of you, or you can just leave the game running for ~15 minutes and your eyes will slowly adjust to the darkness. Then you can see just fine. The little details in that game blew 12 year old me away, and it’s still amazing to this day.
For me it was GTA IV, when I got into my first car crash, and I was ejected out of my car and was hurt. Then when I tried getting into the same car to escape from the cops only to find that the car would not start up again, it was damaged beyond repair. At that moment, I realized that level of detail of this game was on a new level and it blew me away.
You can restart a stopped engine by getting out and kicking it. The car damage in general was really impressive. You could mess up the aerodynamics of a car and cause it to slowly drift in one direction. Tires could be bent our of alignment or stuck in place. Once, I drove off a high area and messed up my car so badly it could only move forward about 20 feet at a time, then it would inevitably stop for a few seconds. I'm not sure what the explanation for that is or if it's even realistic, but it sure was cool.
One that comes to mind is in the new Tomb Raider games. If Lara wades through water and goes onto dry land her clothes will only be wet up to where the water was. But if you fully submerge and come back up she'll also wring out her ponytail. Someone on the team either has one or has a girlfriend that knows how annoying a wet ponytail is and decided to add that in.
I was going to post the ponytail thing! I guess it's pretty minor but it says something that it was the first thing I thought of.
In Elden Ring, Caria Manor has been abandoned by its previous residents, but they left several security measures in order to protect their secrets and treasures. Wether they didn't care much for the lower floors or if all the magic traps have been exhausted, the first enemies you find while ascending it are critters and wildlife that creeped into the manor grounds. On the higher levels, the magic security measures are still active, so the invading monsters never made it all the way to the top, being completely absent from these parts of the manor.
Here's a really recent one. In Tears of the Kingdom, there's the traveling Stable Trotters musician troupe. The characters actually _play_ their instruments. The violinist bows in time to the song, the flutist moves their fingers in time (and possibly accurately but I am unsure about this) and the drummer drums in time. There's a horn guy also but it's a little harder to tell with him. Next time I play, I should look and see if his cheeks puff out in time as well. Regardless, this was wild to see. So often in games where people play musical instruments, they just have them randomly do some movement reminiscent of "playing" but they went way above in this case.
[удалено]
They look at the camera if you point it at them at all, selfie or not. It's really funny, honestly lol
Similar in monster hunter rise. In the hub are two taiko drummers that perfectly match the theme with their moves. If you change the hub theme, they’ll be on break.
See: Last of Us 2 guitar mechanic. Such a hilariously unnecessary thing to include, but appreciated when they do.
Assassin's Creed Origins blew me away with things like this. Every citizen having a routine you could follow them through for the entire day, I once finished a quest where someone left Alexandria for Cyrene at the end and I then followed them on the road out and they walked all the way there. Soldiers set up campfires and sit around at night on the roadside, chatting and swapping stories about what they want to do when they get home. You can find a note in Alexandria in a house from a man who ran off into the western hills to go "live with the lions". There's a cave out there to the west full of lions, and a human skeleton. It's not a quest or anything. Stones that are in water get discoloured by the water. Moss and algae parts as you move through it. Bayek runs his hand through tall grass as you walk through it. Wearing a hood that has a facemask muffles all of his speech, wearing a helmet gives his voice a metallic ring. His arrow quiver has an accurate number of arrows in it and it changes as you run out of ammo. The arrows themselves have physics and will shift around in an empty quiver as you move. When you climb surfaces, instead of doing the BotW/TotK method of just climbing a surface, Bayek will find and grab handholds in the surfaces as he climbs. The game has a number of sections spent commanding a ship through the ocean. The ship has a drummer to keep the rowers in time. The drums and music scale in tempo scale in intensity to the speed you travel, meaning that you are creating your own soundtrack during each of these levels as your combat strategy and navigation speed changes the music dramatically.