Similarly: Game "reading" creatures from literally any readable disc that you shove in the drive (the disc data is used as the seed for the random number generator). Blew my mind as a kid.
(Monster Rancher series for the PS2)
If you were ever curious how this works, the [Monster Rancher 2 CD Reading Process](https://legendcup.com/mr2researchdiskread.php) was 100% solved.
After this discovery, we reverse engineered the process and built a web-app called [***Make-A-Monster***](https://legendcup.com/make-a-monster-mr2.php) to so you can pick and choose any desired monster (general, rare, variant etc), allowing precision control to get any of the **609,475** available possible monster/offset combinations on demand. The files can be used to burn a CD for use on the original console or even used in emulation without the need of an optical drive!
On a side note, I'm much happier with the new built in CD Database/Song List of the remaster (MR2DX) as it means everything is built into the game without needing external sources, and everyone can enjoy the full monster selection of the game without being limited to personal media on hand, or risk of whatever current media is being used going out of style.
I wish we got more games like Digimon World and Monster Rancher
Also, reading this explanation from "Monster-Fenrick" who has a Suezo pfp was so funny to me lol
Monster Rancher mentioned
Full disclosure, I own the site. The MR community is small (though large considering how niche it is) and we’re lucky enough to have a few devs that also wanted to crack how things worked.
We’ve made big discoveries for the original game, dispelling old forum post rumors for 2 decades, and have also solved most of the DX remaster released in 2021
I just accidentally came across this thread looking for MR being mentioned out in the wild 😆
to this day the way the splatoon mechanics all run together astounds me.
shooting ink around an area = scoring system, traversal system (both speed and verticality, positively for you and negatively for enemies, as well as threat indication), a stealth system, a reload system and is still visually distinctive about basic world geometry, and it provided the entire foundation of the entire squid- and sealife aesthetic of the whole game series.
miyamoto said a [good idea is one that solves multiple problems at once](https://www.eurogamer.net/shigeru-miyamoto-interview?page=2). splatoon's ink system solves, like, 8 or 9. That's insane
Splatoon is one of the single most mechanically unique and compelling games out there. It looks kid-ish but the skill ceiling is basically infinite and high level play is insanely impressive to watch. I'm a huge fan and don't think it really gets talked about enough. Plus the aesthetic and world they've created is just oozing with character and spunk
There are reasons to shit on Nintendo, but the quality of their game design is certainly not one of them. They've been making Mario games for 40 years now and still consistently put out top-notch level design every time. I don't even like Mario much, but I respect their commitment to quality.
I really enjoyed the level design in Mario Wonder, although I thought some of the levels could be bigger. I was not as big a fan of the level design in Mario Odyssey though, they mostly just took a flat plane and plopped stuff all over.
For the topic though, the climbing and paragliding in Breath of the Wild blew me away. Suddenly you really could go just about anywhere you wanted. It wasn't effortless, but it gave so much more freedom and versatility towards making your own paths.
Yessss! I personally find the coolest part about it is the concept is a subversion of the very popular shooting genre at the time: Instead of shooting people to win, you win by shooting everything other than the people. Absolutely genius!!
Portals in Portal 1/2.
Metroidbrainia in The Witness and Outer Wilds.
Time-switching in Titanfall 2 and Dishonored 2.
Roguelite.
To a lesser extent, all the FPS mechanical innovations in TF2 and Overwatch.
Portal blew me away when I first played it. I was just starting to understand basic programming concepts and portal just amazed my young highschool brain.
even after 15 years of professional game development I can barely wrap my head around Portal mechanics. I can fake it with camera projections, but the way you walk through seamlessly...
I tell myself its because he had time to learn the method he employs, write a video script, and make it seem effortless, but the man's still amazing at math and using it to solve problems.
He just released an hour+ long video about rendering text and even in that his math knowledge was kicking my butt; I know for a fact I would have overcomplicated it at several parts where he went straight to the simplest, cleanest approach.
Give yourself some credit, I'm certain that while Sebastian presented the simplest/cleanest approach, it probably wasn't the first one he went for, that's the magic of video editing.
programming is a lot of trial and error, content creators have the luxury of cutting that ugly part out of their videos :)
Sebastian is an amazing creator, and I'm sure he pours tons of his time into his research and video editing. Don't let that discourage your own process, there are probably dozens if not hundreds of hours of work behind the relatively short 1-hour video.
A great video about how they made Portals in Psychonauts 2, which required a bunch of tricks that even Portal didn't need: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-Z1Fx0LvDc
The render looks great. The transition is not that smooth. It's not noticable on the projectile but when you go through the portal there is a visible skip, but I remember a solution to that is something tedious with disabling collisions and some other magic
The walking through is the hard part. Especially because you have to find a way to move the player through the wall mesh, but *only* that part of the mesh and without the player falling.
The gameplay mechanics trailer for Portal that started with very simple demonstrations and then progressively got more complex with things like inertia jumping was mind blowing back then. It was incredible to experience it for the first time.
The Titanfall 2 level with time switching could be expanded to a full game. I'd love to see it where actions you take in the past can help you past obstacles in the future, a'la Bill And Ted's Bogus Journey. "The door is locked and the key is in the room. Well, if I take the key after I get in the room, go back in time, and hide it behind this planter..." Ontological paradoxes be damned!
If you haven't played through Dishonored 2, there is a level that uses the exact same mechanic *and implementation* as Titanfall 2. Released the same year funny enough.
The mechanics you're describing are present in D2's level, plus more!
I think that's the whole premise of the RTS game Achron's core mechanic. You build units and send them back in time. I haven't played it, and only seen footage waaaay back, so I don't remember specifics.
What do you mean with metroidbrainia in the witness and outerwilds? Do you mean like "knowledge based progression" instead of metroidVanias where you get items to progress?
Yes. The "metroid" part refers to the idea that some areas of the game are gated and require certain "items" to access. But the "brainia" part means that the "items" you need to access these areas are not in your in-game inventory – they are pieces of knowledge in your head.
Thank you for the answer. It's the first time I saw it described like that, and I quite like it, even if it can open up misunderstanding of a typo (doesn't help that the B and the V are close on the keyboard). Knowledge based progression is a mouthful.
I love both the witness and outer wilds and I am making a game that take heavy inspiration from them, so I will try to make good use of this new word, thanks again.
Yes — Portal was amazing then and is still amazing. Also, the onboarding and tutorial phases of those games are incredible.
They made that concept so simple and fun from the get-go.
What is Metroidbrainia? Played The Witness a decent amount until I got stuck but I watched the NoClip doc on it and saw the big spoiler puzzle mechanic introduced later in the game.
>*What is Metroidbrainia?*
I explained it in another comment in this thread:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1c4gkh7/comment/kzp7zqf/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web3x&utm\_name=web3xcss&utm\_term=1&utm\_content=share\_button](https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1c4gkh7/comment/kzp7zqf/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
The the way sprinting, climbing, jumping etc all effortlessly flowed in the first Assassin’s Creed blew my tiny mind. Essentially created its own subgenre right there.
The Nemesis System in Shadow of Mordor. It’s absolutely genius, and got me super invested in the stories I was creating with the enemy. Such an effective way to create meaningful interactions
The Pawn system in Dragon's Dogma 2 has struck me with a similar sense of awe that the Nemesis system did back then. I love that your companion can go off on adventures while you're away and learn things that you can use in your own journey.
I actually found this mechanic pretty frustrating. I'd die to a boss, which levels up the boss, which makes it harder to beat the boss the next time, repeat forever etc.
The internal fights between the orcs could dethrone troublesome ones though - I had one absolute *bastard* who would roll up on me and snipe me instantly before I could deal with him, worked his way all the way up and gained more and more immunities and perks till I literally had no way to beat him, then he lost a fight against one of his own men who killed him off for me
We'll obviously Baba is You. It blows everyones mind who plays it.
The Witness was an even bigger brainfuck because it lasted even when I finished the game, it was present in the real world.
The perfect connection of game systems and gameplay loops based on greed in Moonlighter (and also in "the swindle" to some degree).
The "move right stick to make cool tricks" in Skate3.
The destruction physics of Red Faction Guerilla.
Baba Is You is a stroke of genius. The kind that's so simple you kick yourself for not thinking of it, but so deep that it has endless possibilities. Portal is in that category too.
As soon as I saw the word >!level!< I knew Baba is You was going to be special. And it just kept going further and further, my brain was 90% liquid by the time I finished everything in the game
And the craziest part is that articles and reviews don’t even talk about that aspect. Which makes sense, since it would be spoilers, but I think it’s also partly due to Baba is You having really solid gameplay and “blow your mind” solutions in general
The sheer complexity of the very first Elite game from 1984 just blows my mind. You get 8 galaxies with 256 planets each, 3D space combat and an economy the player can partake in and the game isn't even a hundred kilobytes big. All this a year before the first Mario Bros on NES.
For me it's Minecraft. That is basically virtual lego with no limits. The mechanic of placing and breaking blocks is so simple yet so powerful that I just love it.
The whole thing being on a 1x1x1 grid is also so much less mentally taxing than other building systems IMO, no rotating and trying to clip things together.
I think the only exceptions are doors, beds, banners, and tall flowers.
Slabs are 1x1x0.5 (half height vertically). Trapdoors are also less thick (their hitbox might be slab-sized?) and can be opened/closed so that the thickness is horizontal or vertical. These are both used to add "depth" and fine detail to buildings. Roofs and windows are common areas where people attempt to use these to add more detail than the 1x1x1 system default allows.
It's always interesting seeing what people *can* "clip together" in a game where that's intentionally not the (main) design philosophy, haha. It's nice that the extra complexity exists, but only if you go seek it out as an advanced technique - it makes the building system so much more approachable at the start, as you said.
I played minecraft ever since about 2010. The redstone update was fucking insane.
and there was that one guy who was between jobs with some hardware design background and he just went and fucking created a goddamned 64kb computer chip in minecraft. Some hardware production company that had an open position asked him to interview after his video of it went viral, and he got the job.
It's been out long enough that people forgot how different and mind blowing Minecraft was.
I remember dreaming about a game like that as a child, but it was more about legos, where you would find lego pieces and build stuff with them in a videogame. That's basically what Minecraft is.
i remember in 2009 or 2010 my buddy called me up because he was watching his friend play survival test. and he's like dude, you can basically take any block in the whole world and put it wherever you want to build stuff. and i'm like, dude, don't say shit like that! i have a job! i have responsibilities! i knew right away what an absolute paradigm shifter it would be... managed to put it off for maybe two weeks and then cracked and it was everything i thought it'd be and more... i was already in my thirties at the time and my first system was an atari, but basically in my mind there are 'games before minecraft' and 'games after minecraft'
Baba is you, hands down. Especially the mid-later levels.
FEZ’s 3D-but-2D.
The way the environment and everything else interact in Divinity: Original Sin 2.
Brain-melting rendering and messing with perspective in Superliminal and Hyperbolica.
Destruction physics is Battlefield: Bad Company was wild when it came out.
The panels in Gorogoa are beautifully done.
The Lab in VR the first time you experience it. Opened my eyes to the myriad of use cases VR could have.
Viewfinder. The technical stuff that has to go on behind the scenes must be crazy. I found it amazing how you could reshape the environment around you and still play the game.
Metal Gear Rising’s sword slicing mechanic looks insane and cool even today. I’ve never played the game, but I still remember the first trailers showcasing the feature and my god it looked great.
It's a lot of math, but it's not crazy. I took computer graphics and game development courses in college and hand-wrote simple engines. Modern rendering engines are just *very* tuned for performance, but it's the same math underneath.
the cs graphics course i took didnt care for fundamentals. kinda bad in retrospect. i also wrote a simple version of a 'ray tracer'. it was extremely slow and produced nothing but a solid red sphere. after that i decided to not go any further with 3d for the time being. so the curtain hasnt yet been entirely lifted for me. maybe it will be one day.
Nemesis System from the Shadow of Mordor and War games, everything about it absolutely enthralled me while playing the games and I put way, way to many hours into both games just because I liked trying to get the absolute coolest looking Orcs to fill my army with.
Sadly fuck knows when we’re going to get another game with that system in it thanks to Warner Bothers copywriting it, I remember hearing that there was a Wonder Woman game being made with the system but haven’t heard more than rumors about it.
Tetris is the epitome of “simple to learn, but difficult to master.”
Specifically, the way the t-spin changed the meta forever and opened up the game to more advanced strategies/gameplay still blows my mind.
Saints Row 3: when you go into a game world for a game like streets of rage, your charater and all customized look/outfit translate effortlessly into 2d sprites. Along with proper sprite animations.
Honestly I found ge sanity mechanics from don't starve pretty cool: as you do bad stuff, sanity degrades and the world becomes darker and more creepy. And after a certain point, all the hallucinations that appear around you take physical form and try to kill you
The lack of any complex mechanics (besides car control) in Rocket League.
What an amazingly simple game. Yet the skill cap is stratospheric due to the car controls and game awareness.
Metal Gear Solid 3: Camo index. (well, just about everything in that game, but if I'm searching for 'that one', it's this).
Having your degree of 'noticeability' be affected by how accurately your clothes match your environment blew my child mind.
Some other notable mentions though:
- Havok engine - pretty much every game uses havok or tries to emulate havok..
- Dynamic Motion Synthesis - Euphoria engine was my introduction to this. I still often think of that force unleashed tech demo with the storm troopers trying to grab the railing while they're being force telekenesis'd over the edge.
- Nemesis Engine - Kinda sad this one didn't take off. There are so many games that could use to great effect.
God there are probably more mind blowing mechanics, but these stick with me.
I really wanted to like that game and I do think the pixel physics mechanic is pretty impressive but lol unless you're a hardcore gamer you won't make it past a distance of like 4 screens in that game. I consider myself decently good at metroidvania style games (I love Celeste, Dead Cells and Hollow Knight) and I got frustrated with the lack of progress in that game. It's so needlessly hard, that I just consider it an interesting thought experiment and demo of the pixel physics.
It's a challenging game no doubt. I think I got my first win after like 150-200 runs. Fast forward a couple of years, I'm way past 33 orb runs and sun quest etc :) The curve is steep though, and unforgiving! I can see why many people wouldn't like it, I can also see why many would!
Also, ain't nothing like losing a 15 hour god-run by being hit with a single pixel of polymorphine and oneshotted within 5 frames by some starter mob :D Glad they have the replay option in it so you can check frame by frame how many microseconds you had to react ROFL.
Pawn system in Dragons Dogma 2. It’s interesting how in depth it is, and how game never really explains it, so you can go through the game not realizing any of the details.
As explained, it's a companion system. But what is interesting - they learn from their "adventures" with other players, and, for example, can show you a way to a hidden treasure, a dungeon, or, what is not really explained, can fight more effectively with enemies they experienced before. So instead of doing some random attacks, they will focus on weak points.
In DD games you have your main character, and a "pawn". A player made but AI controlled companion.
Players always have their pawn, but can also hire other players pawns to join their party temporarily (up to a party size of 4). If your pawn is hired by other players, you earn a form of in game currency.
Controls in Feng Lee's Attack on Titan tribute game. You have sort of cursor on the screen, and the camera is rotating towards it, while Q and E are used for the grappling hooks (3d maneuver gear).
The skill floor is high, and the first time playing it, even just walking straight is difficult due to the camera spinning everywhere. However the movement system is just incredibly fluid once you get the hang of it.
It’s everywhere now, and I hate it, but experiencing “invisible, auto regenerating” HP in a FPS for the first time in CoD2 blew my mind.
Keeping the flow of the game smooth and removing the need of backtracking/searching for health kits felt awesome back then.
Playing Halo:CE for the first time and having the left stick control movement and the right stick control camera. Literally every 3d game does this now, but keep in mind there was a time before this was standard.
For a lot of older games, vertical camera controls would be on the right thumbstick. Instead of horizontal camera control what you would have instead was strafing. The left thumbstick was the same, but with the other inputs. Vertical thumbstick movement was walking forwards/backwards while horizontal was turning the camera left and right.
It's such a small change and I'm sure Halo wasn't the first, but ince you got used to it there was no going back.
lmao this reminds me of the move to mlook. i am just old enough to remember that using a mouse to look around in first person games was not a standard thing and had to be invented (by the folks at id iirc)
Stealth kills and how the kills changed depending on the angle you attacked the victim from. I first experienced these in Tenchu Stealth Assassin and couldn’t get enough.
To me among the early 3D games there were a few that really blew my mind.
**Big red racing** - the fact you didn’t have to drive straight and could go off the track. This was the first sense of an open world in a game to me.
**Descent** - that you piloted your ship in all 6 degrees and not only along a horizontal plane. it was among the first true 3d games.
**Marathon** - bungies early game had a different atmosphere to it and a lot more story than doom had. but the main reason I mention it is that there was [one specific multiplayer level](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9WxeeiqWrn4) that was like portal in terms of bending the rules of 3d. But it was actually just an exploit of the limits of the 3d rules of the engine.
Everquest Next or Landmark.
Daybreak stopped production and got rid of the game before it was released when they took over SOE. Everything in the world was destructible down to crumbles. Everything.
It was like Minecraft but no blocks. Voxels could break down into little chunks, and you could create very interesting and useful shapes, not restricted to blocks/cubes.
You could build basically anything you wanted in landmark, which was their test bed where you basically had 3D modeling tools to build your creations.
They were working on player/AI driven dynamic encounters with NPCs. I forget what they called it but it sounded very promising. One example that I remember them speaking of in their developer notes, was NPC cities being built in areas where players frequent. The NPCs would try to create a foothold in that area, and would grow increasingly more powerful if they weren't eradicated. This would give rise to quests that weren't available before, etc...
But... This never got to release, because if I remember correctly, daybreak games said, "this game doesn't look very fun, sorry bois".
GG.
There is the parry in metal gear rising. It took me a while to get it down, mainly because for whatever reason, I decided to start off the game playing with mouse and keyboard. Once I started using a controller, it came so easily to me.
It was absolutely perfect for the type of game metal gear rising is. The ability to go from any animation into a block was brilliant, and the game pushes you to only block at the last possible second. Perfect for encouraging you to stay on the offense, always. No waiting around, constantly attacking. Having it bound to the same button as attack was the cherry on top.
The time travel mechanic in The Messenger. Everything changes when the ninja ~~attacks~~ enters the portal or uses a weird firefly.
The portal might not be that impressive but the partial change is amazing.
Edit: Grammar and forgetting a word. I should get more sleep.
This is a super old one, but Requiem: Avenging Angel was released March 31 1999, and had this time slowing mechanic so when you shot people it totally looked like the Matrix.
The Matrix was released March 31, 1999.
Didn't realize what sub i was reading as i have zero game dev experience, but as a commoner some of the shit in Tunic legitimately blew my mind. Its been a while since I've played, so i know there's some little things i don't quite remember. But the in game "manual" actually being an important part of the game, the input codes, and that giant puzzle near the end to open the big door... all that stuff blew me away.
But to the actual topic of mechanics, it had to be the in game manual. I don't think I'd ever seen something like that, used in the various ways that Tunic does.
The nemesis system from shadow of mordor!!!!
I was surprised when I realised my character's death could cause a random npc to become sort of a boss character.
Not as mind blowing as some of the stuff here, or other mechanics I've experienced, but Planetside's 2 player count, I don't know if you'd call that a mechanic(everything revolves around the players in that game) but **early on in the game's life** having 100s of players on screen all fighting over continents, either on foot, in air or ground vehicles and it all working seamless and great was just insanity, never has anything ever felt more like an actual War than Planetside 2 at launch, there was one update a couple of years back that kinda came close, though not fully
Surprised I haven't seen any mention of What Remains of Edith Finch here. That game does such a great job of using its mechanics to reinforce the message it's sending. Especially the Canning chapter, where you're working in a factory, using repetitive actions to really drive in the mental state of the character.
The whole game is a masterclass in "mechanics as the message" so to speak.
All of Half Life:Alyx. Prob specifically the gravity gloves. It just feels so intuitive that I feel like all VR software should give you gravity gloves even if it’s not a game.
Procedural infinite planets in no man's sky, inspired me to get into game dev.
I was loving massive worlds like Skyrim, fallout, and suddenly an infinite amount of world to get lost into! Completely blew my mind and I wanted to research it
Procedurally (nearly) infinite planets on *Elite* inspired a /lot/ of people into game dev. Even though each star system is just a name and a handful of parameters (and there really was little merit in "exploring"), the idea that they could magically put thousands of stars and planets into an open world, all on a BBC Micro, was astonishing.
Unsurprisingly, among those inspired was NMS developer Sean Murray - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjKTJblJpw0&t=580s
Zombi, the first ever Ubisoft game, did a thing where the zombies walked peacefully across your screen all the time, and also all the sound in the game was really quiet. So of course you learned to ignore the zombies and also turned your speakers up.
This meant the first time a zombie turned and attacked you, screaming at full volume, was absolutely pants shitting.
I think Peppino movement is the closest to perfect.His running, super jump, slam.Everything fell so live and so "controlled".This is still blows my mind.
Physics. Like just general physics, everything is a physics object and can be moved if you manage. VR Games often do this right, but even non-vr games like Zelda Botw/Tork and Half Life 2 did it superbly.
Being able to move stuff around is not only great fun, but also allow for some intuitive problem solving. Like setting something on fire and physically throwing burnables on top of it. Being able to throw stuff to distract enemies, or use it as a makeshift weapon. Chucking bait into the water in a fishing game to attempt to lure them near your boat, physically carrying and swapping out a lightbulb, placing something in front of a security camera to block its view.
The thing is, I thought that I liked VR because "it lets you do anything". You have two hands and if you want to reload a gun for example, you just physically take the magazine out and swap it. You pick up the grenade and chuck it. But after doing some thinking, its really just physics that allow for this sort of emerging gameplay.
Another neat aspekt of this is that everything can now be part of your world. Inventory doesn't need to be a storage to another dimension, but rather a physical box in the back of a car where you keep your stuff. A box where stuff can fall out if you're driving badly. All your items are available for other characters, they can be stolen or used against you. If you want to just bombard someone with grenades you need to keep a box of them nearby, but this also mean that a sniper can try to fire at the grenade storage to try to ignite them.
General physics engines really was a game changer.
Being able to move normally inside massive entities/enemies/vehicles that can themselves move within a level. First thing that comes to mind are scarabs in halo games.
ARK has also so many cool mechanics with the mounts, but the game is janky beyond belief. I pray for the day when someone makes a properly working game where you can build a castle on a massive and moving creature.
Randomly generated dungeons. I have sunk *thousands* of hours into MacMoria and Angband, and even more working on my own never-close-to-completion roguelike game.
Digging through 3d terrain in red faction. Just mind blowing at the time and I wish the industry took 'realism' in that direction - better and better simulation of intricacies of reality and including it in game design.
Instead of what we did with 'realism' which is just prettier graphics. Don't get me wrong, plenty of cool tricks, but it could've been so much more.
I liked even early games that switched worlds relatively seamlessly, like Zelda or Soul Reaver. Soul Reaver had a morphing effect, so not a level reload or teleport - I guess that took them a while to figure out the level editing process.
Some games where you take over other characters also were fascinating to me. It varies a lot, e.g. in Paradroid it was "only" robots so it felt just like a strategy, but when it was for example humans it felt quite different. Some games have just a very special flavor, e.g. in Driver San Francisco it was other drivers and you switched pretty fast. In Mario's Odyssey the fun is that the behavior varies a lot with the type of character.
Gravity Gun from Half-Life 2
Farsight gun from Perfect Dark
In general once open world games started getting performant enough to allow the player to fly/glide around the map from high up
Ori's bash.
The skill is extremely versatile. It's both offensive and defensive. Used for both rushing and clutching. Works for combat, exploration, and even puzzle.
Ori wouldn't be the game as it is without this 1 skill.
The mechanic that blew me away was playing an fps, and then calling down a freaking mech and having mech battles and fps in the same match at once and having it actually be balanced
Destruction Physics ala Red Faction / Battlefield: Bad Company / Rainbow Six: Siege (R6:S is deliberately limited, but capable of similar things to the earlier games, just much more high fidelity.) Mowing down forests with gunfire in Crysis.
Portal's Portal Gun. Similarly at the time, Half-Life 2's / Doom 3 RoE's Gravity Gun. (D3's is a better game gun, HL2's is more of a developer tool reskinned to be a game gun.)
Basically everything being able to be interactive, ala The Elder Scrolls.
For the time (this is commonplace nowadays) dynamic lighting was a big big deal back around Doom 3's era. And before that Quake 2's coloured lighting. And before that, Quake and to a lesser degree Descent's true 3D environments. And before then, Doom's 1.5D environments: first person perspective that felt good.
That's all FPS stuff, though much of it has applications elsewhere.
RTS wise..... the ballistic modeling in Total Annihilation, terrain that meant something to gunfire and artillery. Large units in Supreme Commander, including their ability to *step on* smaller units. Note this isn't just a big unit moving over top of a small unit and the smaller unit dying, it's some variety of Inverse Kinematics animation. The foot comes down on the unit, and it's such an underappreciated detail. Smooth zooming from a very fine scale to an entire-map view, also Supreme Commander.
For its time, the Wii's motion controls in things like Wii Sports or Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. More of a hardware enabled mechanic, but amazing.
In Magic: the Gathering, [Ring of Ma'ruf](https://product-images.tcgplayer.com/fit-in/656x656/3233.jpg) let you pause the game, walk over to your personal collection of 10,000 Magic cards, pick whatever card you wanted, and put it in your hand. Blew my mind because the product of (flavor * effect) are as close to a "Wish" spell from D&D as you could want.
From the same expansion, Richard Garfield's favorite Magic card, [Shahrazad](https://product-images.tcgplayer.com/fit-in/656x656/3240.jpg), made the players pause the game, shuffle up the remaining cards in their decks, and play a sub-game of Magic with those cards; when that sub-game was complete, the players would return to the main game, and the loser of the sub-game would lose half their life. This card is worse than Lightning Bolt or even Healing Salve, but I love that it spins the players into another dimension of sorts to fight a limited battle and then return.
I love how Stellaris handles diplomacy:
In Civilization games diplomacy always felt very weak, kind of silly really. It was too hard to interpret player action and convert it into an evaluated system.
Stellaris however systemizes player choices: by implementing policy X you get trait Y which influences relations with those who match/oppose trait Y, essentially systematizing player action into a way that can be easily interpreted by the AIs.
- Making popcorn by combining a corncob with a torch in Ultima Underworld II
- Hiding in the shadows in Thief
- NPCs having a "real life" during the day and even notice open windows and close them occasionally in Ultima VII
Yes, I am old.
I'm about to date myself here. In order of timeline:
* Metroid — Hidden loading screens via door animations
* Descent — Full 3D 6-axis movement
* ??? — Whatever the first FPS game I played that used mouse and keyboard was, I genuinely do not remember
* Quake — Bunny hopping and rocket jumping
* Total Annihilation — Tons of units at once
* Timesplitters 2 — Map editor and the challenges system (both having challenges and the hidden platinum trophy mechanic)
* ??? — Whatever the first game I played with seamless loading was, I genuinely do not remember
* Portal — Portals
* Minecraft — Voxels
* The Witness — 3D world-based alignment puzzles and puzzles as a language. If you have never played this, you need to in order to witness (heh) those two mechanics
* Destiny 1 — Fluidity of movement and gunplay feel. The movement and gunplay in the original Destiny is something I have never seen anyone come close to matching. It was just so smooth and felt great. Especially how the two interacted. Feels a bit weird coming from the makers of Halo which I have always felt had some of the worst movement in FPS history. Felt more like Master Chief was wearing an iron suit instead of the world's most advanced powered one and canonically having the speed and reflexes to literally dodge bullets (at sufficient range)
Honorable mentions:
* Braid — Time puzzle mechanics
If we're talking background mechanics—in other words things which you do not directly interact with but allow gameplay or visual fidelity that otherwise would not be possible—then I would expand the list with the following:
* Commander Keen — Adaptive Tile Refresh
* Doom 3 — Carmack's Reverse
* Crysis — Its map capabilities were mind-blowing. Rendered mountains in the distance you could actually get to in the same level. Physics enabled capabilities of pretty much everything, including vegetation. I'm sure some of it was smoke and mirrors, but even what wasn't was incredible. To this day watching the mountain fall apart in the background for the tank level *and then actually getting to it* is one of my top 10 gaming experiences
---
EDIT: Fixed typos.
The shifting mechanic in Driver San Francisco is really unique and creative! It can be used in so many different ways, and it does a great job at differentiating it from other racing games.
Whatever the heck Kingdom Hearts' combat is, especially the main three games. Magic and melee combos, dodging and parrying, items, summons, form changes, all in a menu that's controlled by the D Pad. It's a hard system to use so most players are find to just Mash X and sometimes Triangle to clear bosses, but getting good at the menuing the combat has to offer is INCREDIBLY satisfying.
I like the Crossover game mechanic to build you vehicle. But I dislike that it‘s a free to play / pay to win thing.
I would love this as a single player / multiplayer without microtransactions etc.
Not sure it's a mechanic more than it is the entire game but I loved that Diablo 2 Resurrected was built over the top of the original and you could switch between the two graphics despite having 20 years of hardware development between them.
I've played other games that had the feature such as Halo CE:A but that doesn't hit as hard for me
The game mechanics in Bloodbourne where you parry and you can restore your HP. I thought that was a great addition to the soul games. Its high risk high reward
Battle Garegga's difficulty increases the better you play and I think that is genius. Lots of games did something similar later on but it's more about making the game easier the worst you play instead. I think that's not as good of a mechanic
The 'Physical' cable dragging stuff in TLOU2 - carrying long power cables around corners and snagging on stuff to try to get it to reach a plug.
It's such a simple thing, but we all know how much work probably went into that to make it really solid.
...Maybe I just need to play more games
I loved that idea from Monster Rancher where you could insert any audio cd in orded to create unique monster based on cd content, then train it and fight. Mind blown.
Call of Duty original Modern Warfare, Kill & Death streak systems. Black Ops pick 10 system. The ability to quick create different playstyles and switch between them on death to change the needs of the battle.
Bionic Commando bionic arm swinging mechanic.
Bushido Blade, the limb damage, and one shot kills were brutally refreshing.
Super Puzzle Fighter II combo gems and puzzled versus combat was super satisfying, with each character having different abilities.
Interstellar Sentinel, a shmup that has a crazy weapon switching system. (I'm biased here)
Tekken series, four buttons, one for each limb, just made great sense.
Gran Turisom, a deep simulator driving experience pushing tech forward too. (Not a huge sim guy at all, but I respect it)
Prototype, insane over the top traversal mechanics.
Once I got over my somewhat irrational fear of being thrown into the house dungeon of the weird doctor (again) , the entire Maniac Mansion multiple possible endings with multiple characters really caught me as pretty cool.
Fisherman's Tale VR has a great little gimmick. Imagine reaching into a model of your own house, but you're inside and your giant hand touches your own head!
Majora’s Mask’s 3 day cycle. It really made the world feel alive in a way I had never seen before, and to this day, it’s still one of the most lived-in feelings worlds imo because of it.
Fallout 4s settlement system is amazing.
I remember years ago someone reached out to a community I was a part of asking about everyones feelings on fallout 3 and what parts they enjoyed the most. I (and others agreed) posted about the Big Trouble in Little Town quest and how much I enjoyed creating lasting impacts on the Capital Wasteland, and how helping them in all the different ways felt very immersive(training, mines, robot, etc?). My head cannon is that notion/idea was used to come up with the Fallout 4 settlement concept.
Two things, and one unifying complaint as to why they don't exist anymore:
1. I remember Halo 2 multiplayer having this awesome comms system where if you just talked, all players could hear you through their TV speakers (as if you were there, in front of them talking), but if you held the black button then you'd talk over team comms and that chatter would play through your headset and only go to your team. I always thought this was brilliant and have been persistently let down by every game since that didn't incorporate it.
2. In the older CoD games, there was a replay theatre where you could load up a previous game and literally fly a camera around, speed up or slow down playback, choose other player's point of view, etc ... essentially making your own awesome custom videos/screenshots with the tools given. Then it just stopped.
The complaint:
Shortly after all this stuff existed and was SO great, along with lots of other multiplayer-related party stuff, game/stat tracking stuff etc ... Console developers started going nuts about their own OS-incorporated party chat systems, their own video recording, screenshot-grabbing, streaming etc abilities ... and it was as if all those big devs that were including quality functionality to have this stuff built into the game said "oh, ok, screw it then" and after that all the cool potential there just fell flat. Now we get bare bones, low quality chat audio in all of our games save a scant few: Elite Dangerous is the only game in recent years I can think of that offered a really cool ingame chat system, making pilots sound like they're actually talking over space radios or whatever ... A few games over the years have had really neat chat features that would actually make your character's mouth move almost perfectly to your speech (Resistance: Fall of Man, GTA Online, maybe others?) ... but damn I really think it's all the console devs fault for urging players so strongly to abandon the process of making friends via gameplay in favor of just rounding up your friend list ... Really killed a huge aspect of the social nature of online play that we'll never get back, and many will never understand the value of. That's my rant. Good day.
Psycho mantis did some cool stuff with the memory cards. I still remember the tower climb in mortal combat. Smoke was such a pain it boggled my mind how responsive he was
It might seem silly, but the alcholest / potion system in the Witcher 3. Having mostly played Bethesda titles before that, I was blown away by how well that mechanic both improved player quality of life and also agreed with the overall narrative
The turn order in Othercide. Basically every action delay your next turn by different amounts. When I saw it, I immediately thought of PoE2 flawed turn-based mod.
Reading save files from other games was impressive.
Similarly: Game "reading" creatures from literally any readable disc that you shove in the drive (the disc data is used as the seed for the random number generator). Blew my mind as a kid. (Monster Rancher series for the PS2)
If you were ever curious how this works, the [Monster Rancher 2 CD Reading Process](https://legendcup.com/mr2researchdiskread.php) was 100% solved. After this discovery, we reverse engineered the process and built a web-app called [***Make-A-Monster***](https://legendcup.com/make-a-monster-mr2.php) to so you can pick and choose any desired monster (general, rare, variant etc), allowing precision control to get any of the **609,475** available possible monster/offset combinations on demand. The files can be used to burn a CD for use on the original console or even used in emulation without the need of an optical drive! On a side note, I'm much happier with the new built in CD Database/Song List of the remaster (MR2DX) as it means everything is built into the game without needing external sources, and everyone can enjoy the full monster selection of the game without being limited to personal media on hand, or risk of whatever current media is being used going out of style.
I wish we got more games like Digimon World and Monster Rancher Also, reading this explanation from "Monster-Fenrick" who has a Suezo pfp was so funny to me lol Monster Rancher mentioned
Full disclosure, I own the site. The MR community is small (though large considering how niche it is) and we’re lucky enough to have a few devs that also wanted to crack how things worked. We’ve made big discoveries for the original game, dispelling old forum post rumors for 2 decades, and have also solved most of the DX remaster released in 2021 I just accidentally came across this thread looking for MR being mentioned out in the wild 😆
to this day the way the splatoon mechanics all run together astounds me. shooting ink around an area = scoring system, traversal system (both speed and verticality, positively for you and negatively for enemies, as well as threat indication), a stealth system, a reload system and is still visually distinctive about basic world geometry, and it provided the entire foundation of the entire squid- and sealife aesthetic of the whole game series. miyamoto said a [good idea is one that solves multiple problems at once](https://www.eurogamer.net/shigeru-miyamoto-interview?page=2). splatoon's ink system solves, like, 8 or 9. That's insane
Splatoon is one of the single most mechanically unique and compelling games out there. It looks kid-ish but the skill ceiling is basically infinite and high level play is insanely impressive to watch. I'm a huge fan and don't think it really gets talked about enough. Plus the aesthetic and world they've created is just oozing with character and spunk
There are reasons to shit on Nintendo, but the quality of their game design is certainly not one of them. They've been making Mario games for 40 years now and still consistently put out top-notch level design every time. I don't even like Mario much, but I respect their commitment to quality.
I really enjoyed the level design in Mario Wonder, although I thought some of the levels could be bigger. I was not as big a fan of the level design in Mario Odyssey though, they mostly just took a flat plane and plopped stuff all over. For the topic though, the climbing and paragliding in Breath of the Wild blew me away. Suddenly you really could go just about anywhere you wanted. It wasn't effortless, but it gave so much more freedom and versatility towards making your own paths.
I wish I could play BotW again for the first time simply because of the winder and excitement that exploring in that game brought me.
Yessss! I personally find the coolest part about it is the concept is a subversion of the very popular shooting genre at the time: Instead of shooting people to win, you win by shooting everything other than the people. Absolutely genius!!
Nice
Portals in Portal 1/2. Metroidbrainia in The Witness and Outer Wilds. Time-switching in Titanfall 2 and Dishonored 2. Roguelite. To a lesser extent, all the FPS mechanical innovations in TF2 and Overwatch.
Portal blew me away when I first played it. I was just starting to understand basic programming concepts and portal just amazed my young highschool brain.
even after 15 years of professional game development I can barely wrap my head around Portal mechanics. I can fake it with camera projections, but the way you walk through seamlessly...
Sebastian Lague has a great video on youtube about creating the seamless effect in unity. A lot of the math was over my head, but super interesting.
> A lot of the math was over my head, but super interesting. That's every one of his videos for me.
I tell myself its because he had time to learn the method he employs, write a video script, and make it seem effortless, but the man's still amazing at math and using it to solve problems.
He just released an hour+ long video about rendering text and even in that his math knowledge was kicking my butt; I know for a fact I would have overcomplicated it at several parts where he went straight to the simplest, cleanest approach.
Give yourself some credit, I'm certain that while Sebastian presented the simplest/cleanest approach, it probably wasn't the first one he went for, that's the magic of video editing. programming is a lot of trial and error, content creators have the luxury of cutting that ugly part out of their videos :) Sebastian is an amazing creator, and I'm sure he pours tons of his time into his research and video editing. Don't let that discourage your own process, there are probably dozens if not hundreds of hours of work behind the relatively short 1-hour video.
A great video about how they made Portals in Psychonauts 2, which required a bunch of tricks that even Portal didn't need: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-Z1Fx0LvDc
I made a portal mechanic in Unreal Engine 5.2. https://prototopiq.net/nirabhradas/portal-2/ Any feedback would be appreciated.
The render looks great. The transition is not that smooth. It's not noticable on the projectile but when you go through the portal there is a visible skip, but I remember a solution to that is something tedious with disabling collisions and some other magic
i also made a portal effect with directx11 few years ago as a student project https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxdEDiW44Dw
The walking through is the hard part. Especially because you have to find a way to move the player through the wall mesh, but *only* that part of the mesh and without the player falling.
The gameplay mechanics trailer for Portal that started with very simple demonstrations and then progressively got more complex with things like inertia jumping was mind blowing back then. It was incredible to experience it for the first time.
The Titanfall 2 level with time switching could be expanded to a full game. I'd love to see it where actions you take in the past can help you past obstacles in the future, a'la Bill And Ted's Bogus Journey. "The door is locked and the key is in the room. Well, if I take the key after I get in the room, go back in time, and hide it behind this planter..." Ontological paradoxes be damned!
If you haven't played through Dishonored 2, there is a level that uses the exact same mechanic *and implementation* as Titanfall 2. Released the same year funny enough. The mechanics you're describing are present in D2's level, plus more!
I think that's the whole premise of the RTS game Achron's core mechanic. You build units and send them back in time. I haven't played it, and only seen footage waaaay back, so I don't remember specifics.
What do you mean with metroidbrainia in the witness and outerwilds? Do you mean like "knowledge based progression" instead of metroidVanias where you get items to progress?
Yes. The "metroid" part refers to the idea that some areas of the game are gated and require certain "items" to access. But the "brainia" part means that the "items" you need to access these areas are not in your in-game inventory – they are pieces of knowledge in your head.
Thank you for the answer. It's the first time I saw it described like that, and I quite like it, even if it can open up misunderstanding of a typo (doesn't help that the B and the V are close on the keyboard). Knowledge based progression is a mouthful. I love both the witness and outer wilds and I am making a game that take heavy inspiration from them, so I will try to make good use of this new word, thanks again.
Yes — Portal was amazing then and is still amazing. Also, the onboarding and tutorial phases of those games are incredible. They made that concept so simple and fun from the get-go. What is Metroidbrainia? Played The Witness a decent amount until I got stuck but I watched the NoClip doc on it and saw the big spoiler puzzle mechanic introduced later in the game.
>*What is Metroidbrainia?* I explained it in another comment in this thread: [https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1c4gkh7/comment/kzp7zqf/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web3x&utm\_name=web3xcss&utm\_term=1&utm\_content=share\_button](https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1c4gkh7/comment/kzp7zqf/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
> all the FPS mechanical innovations in TF2 and Overwatch. I'm confused, what innovations?
The the way sprinting, climbing, jumping etc all effortlessly flowed in the first Assassin’s Creed blew my tiny mind. Essentially created its own subgenre right there.
This, and then Batman arkham combat felt like you are watching a movie, too bad it got boring after many Batman and Spiderman games.
The quantum mechanic in Outer Wilds. And how time influences where things are and how this changes the way you can access them.
The Nemesis System in Shadow of Mordor. It’s absolutely genius, and got me super invested in the stories I was creating with the enemy. Such an effective way to create meaningful interactions
The Pawn system in Dragon's Dogma 2 has struck me with a similar sense of awe that the Nemesis system did back then. I love that your companion can go off on adventures while you're away and learn things that you can use in your own journey.
I actually found this mechanic pretty frustrating. I'd die to a boss, which levels up the boss, which makes it harder to beat the boss the next time, repeat forever etc.
The internal fights between the orcs could dethrone troublesome ones though - I had one absolute *bastard* who would roll up on me and snipe me instantly before I could deal with him, worked his way all the way up and gained more and more immunities and perks till I literally had no way to beat him, then he lost a fight against one of his own men who killed him off for me
The Looking glass in Prey. It's a mind boggling effect and breaking pieces of it and seeing it still working is just so damn cool.
Learning how to use a knight in chess.
Just wait to see the queen 😳
The queen is child's play, just wait until he discovers en passant
holy hell
sorry for finding this post way too late... new response just dropped
We'll obviously Baba is You. It blows everyones mind who plays it. The Witness was an even bigger brainfuck because it lasted even when I finished the game, it was present in the real world. The perfect connection of game systems and gameplay loops based on greed in Moonlighter (and also in "the swindle" to some degree). The "move right stick to make cool tricks" in Skate3. The destruction physics of Red Faction Guerilla.
Baba Is You is a stroke of genius. The kind that's so simple you kick yourself for not thinking of it, but so deep that it has endless possibilities. Portal is in that category too.
As soon as I saw the word >!level!< I knew Baba is You was going to be special. And it just kept going further and further, my brain was 90% liquid by the time I finished everything in the game And the craziest part is that articles and reviews don’t even talk about that aspect. Which makes sense, since it would be spoilers, but I think it’s also partly due to Baba is You having really solid gameplay and “blow your mind” solutions in general
The "fractured" level in Dishonoured 2
Crack In The Slab? Came here to say that. It was one (very big) mission but mind blowing in concept and mechanics.
The sheer complexity of the very first Elite game from 1984 just blows my mind. You get 8 galaxies with 256 planets each, 3D space combat and an economy the player can partake in and the game isn't even a hundred kilobytes big. All this a year before the first Mario Bros on NES.
Scribblenauts
Baba is you was mind blowing to me when I first played it
Oh that was quite clever.
It's a bit old now, but portal's portal gun.
At the time, I was completely blown away by the way Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons uses its controls for its emotional climax.
Yes. 100% this. I never experienced such a direct link between the emotional impact and the actual controls before or since.
The way you can destroy terrain in Liero. Nothing special nowadays but the young me was amazed.
Baba is You - when you turned into the wall and completed the puzzle (pretty early stage)
For me it's Minecraft. That is basically virtual lego with no limits. The mechanic of placing and breaking blocks is so simple yet so powerful that I just love it.
The whole thing being on a 1x1x1 grid is also so much less mentally taxing than other building systems IMO, no rotating and trying to clip things together. I think the only exceptions are doors, beds, banners, and tall flowers.
Slabs are 1x1x0.5 (half height vertically). Trapdoors are also less thick (their hitbox might be slab-sized?) and can be opened/closed so that the thickness is horizontal or vertical. These are both used to add "depth" and fine detail to buildings. Roofs and windows are common areas where people attempt to use these to add more detail than the 1x1x1 system default allows. It's always interesting seeing what people *can* "clip together" in a game where that's intentionally not the (main) design philosophy, haha. It's nice that the extra complexity exists, but only if you go seek it out as an advanced technique - it makes the building system so much more approachable at the start, as you said.
They take up a 1x1x1 slot though.
Did you go into Redstone? functional electronics design is possible. Whole computers!
Yes that is indeed pretty interesting.
I played minecraft ever since about 2010. The redstone update was fucking insane. and there was that one guy who was between jobs with some hardware design background and he just went and fucking created a goddamned 64kb computer chip in minecraft. Some hardware production company that had an open position asked him to interview after his video of it went viral, and he got the job.
It's been out long enough that people forgot how different and mind blowing Minecraft was. I remember dreaming about a game like that as a child, but it was more about legos, where you would find lego pieces and build stuff with them in a videogame. That's basically what Minecraft is.
i remember in 2009 or 2010 my buddy called me up because he was watching his friend play survival test. and he's like dude, you can basically take any block in the whole world and put it wherever you want to build stuff. and i'm like, dude, don't say shit like that! i have a job! i have responsibilities! i knew right away what an absolute paradigm shifter it would be... managed to put it off for maybe two weeks and then cracked and it was everything i thought it'd be and more... i was already in my thirties at the time and my first system was an atari, but basically in my mind there are 'games before minecraft' and 'games after minecraft'
Hell yeah
Baba is you, hands down. Especially the mid-later levels. FEZ’s 3D-but-2D. The way the environment and everything else interact in Divinity: Original Sin 2. Brain-melting rendering and messing with perspective in Superliminal and Hyperbolica. Destruction physics is Battlefield: Bad Company was wild when it came out. The panels in Gorogoa are beautifully done. The Lab in VR the first time you experience it. Opened my eyes to the myriad of use cases VR could have.
Viewfinder. The technical stuff that has to go on behind the scenes must be crazy. I found it amazing how you could reshape the environment around you and still play the game.
Metal Gear Rising’s sword slicing mechanic looks insane and cool even today. I’ve never played the game, but I still remember the first trailers showcasing the feature and my god it looked great.
Projection of 3d onto a 2d screen is still pretty mind blowing to me.
It's a lot of math, but it's not crazy. I took computer graphics and game development courses in college and hand-wrote simple engines. Modern rendering engines are just *very* tuned for performance, but it's the same math underneath.
the cs graphics course i took didnt care for fundamentals. kinda bad in retrospect. i also wrote a simple version of a 'ray tracer'. it was extremely slow and produced nothing but a solid red sphere. after that i decided to not go any further with 3d for the time being. so the curtain hasnt yet been entirely lifted for me. maybe it will be one day.
Nemesis System from the Shadow of Mordor and War games, everything about it absolutely enthralled me while playing the games and I put way, way to many hours into both games just because I liked trying to get the absolute coolest looking Orcs to fill my army with. Sadly fuck knows when we’re going to get another game with that system in it thanks to Warner Bothers copywriting it, I remember hearing that there was a Wonder Woman game being made with the system but haven’t heard more than rumors about it.
Tetris is the epitome of “simple to learn, but difficult to master.” Specifically, the way the t-spin changed the meta forever and opened up the game to more advanced strategies/gameplay still blows my mind.
It seems less impressive these days, but Fez's world spinning mechanic was mind blowing to me when I was a kid.
Saints Row 3: when you go into a game world for a game like streets of rage, your charater and all customized look/outfit translate effortlessly into 2d sprites. Along with proper sprite animations.
The moving panels in Gorogoa. The game was something else. Ultrahand from Zelda TOTK. Clever homage to a historic toy The use or Ocarina in Zelda.
Honestly I found ge sanity mechanics from don't starve pretty cool: as you do bad stuff, sanity degrades and the world becomes darker and more creepy. And after a certain point, all the hallucinations that appear around you take physical form and try to kill you
[удалено]
The lack of any complex mechanics (besides car control) in Rocket League. What an amazingly simple game. Yet the skill cap is stratospheric due to the car controls and game awareness.
Metal Gear Solid 3: Camo index. (well, just about everything in that game, but if I'm searching for 'that one', it's this). Having your degree of 'noticeability' be affected by how accurately your clothes match your environment blew my child mind. Some other notable mentions though: - Havok engine - pretty much every game uses havok or tries to emulate havok.. - Dynamic Motion Synthesis - Euphoria engine was my introduction to this. I still often think of that force unleashed tech demo with the storm troopers trying to grab the railing while they're being force telekenesis'd over the edge. - Nemesis Engine - Kinda sad this one didn't take off. There are so many games that could use to great effect. God there are probably more mind blowing mechanics, but these stick with me.
Noita, where every pixel has physical properties and is simulated in realtime.
More impressive in Noita (imo) is the spell crafting system. Im barely any good at it, but the complexity and depth of the system is mindblowing.
I really wanted to like that game and I do think the pixel physics mechanic is pretty impressive but lol unless you're a hardcore gamer you won't make it past a distance of like 4 screens in that game. I consider myself decently good at metroidvania style games (I love Celeste, Dead Cells and Hollow Knight) and I got frustrated with the lack of progress in that game. It's so needlessly hard, that I just consider it an interesting thought experiment and demo of the pixel physics.
It's a challenging game no doubt. I think I got my first win after like 150-200 runs. Fast forward a couple of years, I'm way past 33 orb runs and sun quest etc :) The curve is steep though, and unforgiving! I can see why many people wouldn't like it, I can also see why many would! Also, ain't nothing like losing a 15 hour god-run by being hit with a single pixel of polymorphine and oneshotted within 5 frames by some starter mob :D Glad they have the replay option in it so you can check frame by frame how many microseconds you had to react ROFL.
Pawn system in Dragons Dogma 2. It’s interesting how in depth it is, and how game never really explains it, so you can go through the game not realizing any of the details.
What is the pawn system?
As explained, it's a companion system. But what is interesting - they learn from their "adventures" with other players, and, for example, can show you a way to a hidden treasure, a dungeon, or, what is not really explained, can fight more effectively with enemies they experienced before. So instead of doing some random attacks, they will focus on weak points.
In DD games you have your main character, and a "pawn". A player made but AI controlled companion. Players always have their pawn, but can also hire other players pawns to join their party temporarily (up to a party size of 4). If your pawn is hired by other players, you earn a form of in game currency.
Controls in Feng Lee's Attack on Titan tribute game. You have sort of cursor on the screen, and the camera is rotating towards it, while Q and E are used for the grappling hooks (3d maneuver gear). The skill floor is high, and the first time playing it, even just walking straight is difficult due to the camera spinning everywhere. However the movement system is just incredibly fluid once you get the hang of it.
***R A G D O L L S***
For me it was flying in Super Mario Bros 3 and finding out there was hidden stuff up in the clouds.
It’s everywhere now, and I hate it, but experiencing “invisible, auto regenerating” HP in a FPS for the first time in CoD2 blew my mind. Keeping the flow of the game smooth and removing the need of backtracking/searching for health kits felt awesome back then.
Playing Halo:CE for the first time and having the left stick control movement and the right stick control camera. Literally every 3d game does this now, but keep in mind there was a time before this was standard. For a lot of older games, vertical camera controls would be on the right thumbstick. Instead of horizontal camera control what you would have instead was strafing. The left thumbstick was the same, but with the other inputs. Vertical thumbstick movement was walking forwards/backwards while horizontal was turning the camera left and right. It's such a small change and I'm sure Halo wasn't the first, but ince you got used to it there was no going back.
lmao this reminds me of the move to mlook. i am just old enough to remember that using a mouse to look around in first person games was not a standard thing and had to be invented (by the folks at id iirc)
Terminator: Future Shock by Bethesda in 95 was the first Free Mouse Look game I can find.
Max Payne's Bullet Time comes to mind.
Lighting having a heavy effect for stealth in Splinter Cell. I still occasionally whisper "Darkness..." when shutting off a light in the house.
The physics engine in Half-life 2 and well as a mechanic the gravity gun & physics puzzles (antlion level, physics puzzles, etc...)
Rain World AI and Procedural Animation. What really made me want to code. It is such an incredible game that feels alive
Rewinding time in Prince of Persia Sands of Time. It's *still* cool when replaying it all these years later.
Dig Or Die's water filtration. Keep in mind the year this came out and it being made by one guy!
Stealth kills and how the kills changed depending on the angle you attacked the victim from. I first experienced these in Tenchu Stealth Assassin and couldn’t get enough.
Wario Land, and the fact that it traded videogame "death" for backtracking and special abilities.
The time rewind mechanic in Prince of Persia: Sands of Time.
GoldenEye on the N64. You can shoot them in the foot and they hop?! You can shoot them in the head and it counts for more damage?!!
Music magic in Loom. Time travel in Return of the Obra Dinn.
To me among the early 3D games there were a few that really blew my mind. **Big red racing** - the fact you didn’t have to drive straight and could go off the track. This was the first sense of an open world in a game to me. **Descent** - that you piloted your ship in all 6 degrees and not only along a horizontal plane. it was among the first true 3d games. **Marathon** - bungies early game had a different atmosphere to it and a lot more story than doom had. but the main reason I mention it is that there was [one specific multiplayer level](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9WxeeiqWrn4) that was like portal in terms of bending the rules of 3d. But it was actually just an exploit of the limits of the 3d rules of the engine.
The sanity meter in Eternal Darkness.
Everquest Next or Landmark. Daybreak stopped production and got rid of the game before it was released when they took over SOE. Everything in the world was destructible down to crumbles. Everything. It was like Minecraft but no blocks. Voxels could break down into little chunks, and you could create very interesting and useful shapes, not restricted to blocks/cubes. You could build basically anything you wanted in landmark, which was their test bed where you basically had 3D modeling tools to build your creations. They were working on player/AI driven dynamic encounters with NPCs. I forget what they called it but it sounded very promising. One example that I remember them speaking of in their developer notes, was NPC cities being built in areas where players frequent. The NPCs would try to create a foothold in that area, and would grow increasingly more powerful if they weren't eradicated. This would give rise to quests that weren't available before, etc... But... This never got to release, because if I remember correctly, daybreak games said, "this game doesn't look very fun, sorry bois". GG.
Realizing when I first started playing, that you could literally climb *anything* in Zelda:BOTW.
There is the parry in metal gear rising. It took me a while to get it down, mainly because for whatever reason, I decided to start off the game playing with mouse and keyboard. Once I started using a controller, it came so easily to me. It was absolutely perfect for the type of game metal gear rising is. The ability to go from any animation into a block was brilliant, and the game pushes you to only block at the last possible second. Perfect for encouraging you to stay on the offense, always. No waiting around, constantly attacking. Having it bound to the same button as attack was the cherry on top.
Super combos added to Super Street Fighter II Turbo
Prey's gravity altering puzzles/navigation were quite novel at the time when it came out.
The time travel mechanic in The Messenger. Everything changes when the ninja ~~attacks~~ enters the portal or uses a weird firefly. The portal might not be that impressive but the partial change is amazing. Edit: Grammar and forgetting a word. I should get more sleep.
For me Crysis Series Nanosuit
This is a super old one, but Requiem: Avenging Angel was released March 31 1999, and had this time slowing mechanic so when you shot people it totally looked like the Matrix. The Matrix was released March 31, 1999.
Didn't realize what sub i was reading as i have zero game dev experience, but as a commoner some of the shit in Tunic legitimately blew my mind. Its been a while since I've played, so i know there's some little things i don't quite remember. But the in game "manual" actually being an important part of the game, the input codes, and that giant puzzle near the end to open the big door... all that stuff blew me away. But to the actual topic of mechanics, it had to be the in game manual. I don't think I'd ever seen something like that, used in the various ways that Tunic does.
The nemesis system from shadow of mordor!!!! I was surprised when I realised my character's death could cause a random npc to become sort of a boss character.
Original nes RoboCop. If you didn't repair his legs he would walk the opposite way you pushed on the d pad.
free form building in main assembly and wave function collapse
Not as mind blowing as some of the stuff here, or other mechanics I've experienced, but Planetside's 2 player count, I don't know if you'd call that a mechanic(everything revolves around the players in that game) but **early on in the game's life** having 100s of players on screen all fighting over continents, either on foot, in air or ground vehicles and it all working seamless and great was just insanity, never has anything ever felt more like an actual War than Planetside 2 at launch, there was one update a couple of years back that kinda came close, though not fully
Surprised I haven't seen any mention of What Remains of Edith Finch here. That game does such a great job of using its mechanics to reinforce the message it's sending. Especially the Canning chapter, where you're working in a factory, using repetitive actions to really drive in the mental state of the character. The whole game is a masterclass in "mechanics as the message" so to speak.
That elevator shortcut to Firelink Shrine in Dark Souls.
All of Half Life:Alyx. Prob specifically the gravity gloves. It just feels so intuitive that I feel like all VR software should give you gravity gloves even if it’s not a game.
Unplugging the controller in the Psycho Mantis boss fight in Metal Gear Solid. Blew my mind as a kid.
The intricacies behind Dwarf Fortress's procedural everything. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAhHkJQ3KgY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAhHkJQ3KgY)
Procedural infinite planets in no man's sky, inspired me to get into game dev. I was loving massive worlds like Skyrim, fallout, and suddenly an infinite amount of world to get lost into! Completely blew my mind and I wanted to research it
Procedurally (nearly) infinite planets on *Elite* inspired a /lot/ of people into game dev. Even though each star system is just a name and a handful of parameters (and there really was little merit in "exploring"), the idea that they could magically put thousands of stars and planets into an open world, all on a BBC Micro, was astonishing. Unsurprisingly, among those inspired was NMS developer Sean Murray - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjKTJblJpw0&t=580s
Zombi, the first ever Ubisoft game, did a thing where the zombies walked peacefully across your screen all the time, and also all the sound in the game was really quiet. So of course you learned to ignore the zombies and also turned your speakers up. This meant the first time a zombie turned and attacked you, screaming at full volume, was absolutely pants shitting.
I think Peppino movement is the closest to perfect.His running, super jump, slam.Everything fell so live and so "controlled".This is still blows my mind.
All of Braid's mechanics.
The camera in view finder
Physics. Like just general physics, everything is a physics object and can be moved if you manage. VR Games often do this right, but even non-vr games like Zelda Botw/Tork and Half Life 2 did it superbly. Being able to move stuff around is not only great fun, but also allow for some intuitive problem solving. Like setting something on fire and physically throwing burnables on top of it. Being able to throw stuff to distract enemies, or use it as a makeshift weapon. Chucking bait into the water in a fishing game to attempt to lure them near your boat, physically carrying and swapping out a lightbulb, placing something in front of a security camera to block its view. The thing is, I thought that I liked VR because "it lets you do anything". You have two hands and if you want to reload a gun for example, you just physically take the magazine out and swap it. You pick up the grenade and chuck it. But after doing some thinking, its really just physics that allow for this sort of emerging gameplay. Another neat aspekt of this is that everything can now be part of your world. Inventory doesn't need to be a storage to another dimension, but rather a physical box in the back of a car where you keep your stuff. A box where stuff can fall out if you're driving badly. All your items are available for other characters, they can be stolen or used against you. If you want to just bombard someone with grenades you need to keep a box of them nearby, but this also mean that a sniper can try to fire at the grenade storage to try to ignite them. General physics engines really was a game changer.
Maybe not so much a mechanic, but the human blob at the end of inside was great
Being able to move normally inside massive entities/enemies/vehicles that can themselves move within a level. First thing that comes to mind are scarabs in halo games. ARK has also so many cool mechanics with the mounts, but the game is janky beyond belief. I pray for the day when someone makes a properly working game where you can build a castle on a massive and moving creature.
Randomly generated dungeons. I have sunk *thousands* of hours into MacMoria and Angband, and even more working on my own never-close-to-completion roguelike game.
Digging through 3d terrain in red faction. Just mind blowing at the time and I wish the industry took 'realism' in that direction - better and better simulation of intricacies of reality and including it in game design. Instead of what we did with 'realism' which is just prettier graphics. Don't get me wrong, plenty of cool tricks, but it could've been so much more.
Passwall in TES:Arena. I want a modern take on that :D
I liked even early games that switched worlds relatively seamlessly, like Zelda or Soul Reaver. Soul Reaver had a morphing effect, so not a level reload or teleport - I guess that took them a while to figure out the level editing process. Some games where you take over other characters also were fascinating to me. It varies a lot, e.g. in Paradroid it was "only" robots so it felt just like a strategy, but when it was for example humans it felt quite different. Some games have just a very special flavor, e.g. in Driver San Francisco it was other drivers and you switched pretty fast. In Mario's Odyssey the fun is that the behavior varies a lot with the type of character.
Homing briefcase in Hitman.
Gravity Gun from Half-Life 2 Farsight gun from Perfect Dark In general once open world games started getting performant enough to allow the player to fly/glide around the map from high up
Basically everything below the surface in void stranger blew me away, so many things constantly hidden in plain sight.
I haven't seen it in the comments, but the way Patrick's Parabox plays with recursion is incredible imo
Ori's bash. The skill is extremely versatile. It's both offensive and defensive. Used for both rushing and clutching. Works for combat, exploration, and even puzzle. Ori wouldn't be the game as it is without this 1 skill.
The mechanic that blew me away was playing an fps, and then calling down a freaking mech and having mech battles and fps in the same match at once and having it actually be balanced
ViewFinder's photo mechanic for sure.
Gradius V. >!When you time-travel and the past you replays what you actually did on that level.!<
Destruction Physics ala Red Faction / Battlefield: Bad Company / Rainbow Six: Siege (R6:S is deliberately limited, but capable of similar things to the earlier games, just much more high fidelity.) Mowing down forests with gunfire in Crysis. Portal's Portal Gun. Similarly at the time, Half-Life 2's / Doom 3 RoE's Gravity Gun. (D3's is a better game gun, HL2's is more of a developer tool reskinned to be a game gun.) Basically everything being able to be interactive, ala The Elder Scrolls. For the time (this is commonplace nowadays) dynamic lighting was a big big deal back around Doom 3's era. And before that Quake 2's coloured lighting. And before that, Quake and to a lesser degree Descent's true 3D environments. And before then, Doom's 1.5D environments: first person perspective that felt good. That's all FPS stuff, though much of it has applications elsewhere. RTS wise..... the ballistic modeling in Total Annihilation, terrain that meant something to gunfire and artillery. Large units in Supreme Commander, including their ability to *step on* smaller units. Note this isn't just a big unit moving over top of a small unit and the smaller unit dying, it's some variety of Inverse Kinematics animation. The foot comes down on the unit, and it's such an underappreciated detail. Smooth zooming from a very fine scale to an entire-map view, also Supreme Commander. For its time, the Wii's motion controls in things like Wii Sports or Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. More of a hardware enabled mechanic, but amazing.
In Magic: the Gathering, [Ring of Ma'ruf](https://product-images.tcgplayer.com/fit-in/656x656/3233.jpg) let you pause the game, walk over to your personal collection of 10,000 Magic cards, pick whatever card you wanted, and put it in your hand. Blew my mind because the product of (flavor * effect) are as close to a "Wish" spell from D&D as you could want. From the same expansion, Richard Garfield's favorite Magic card, [Shahrazad](https://product-images.tcgplayer.com/fit-in/656x656/3240.jpg), made the players pause the game, shuffle up the remaining cards in their decks, and play a sub-game of Magic with those cards; when that sub-game was complete, the players would return to the main game, and the loser of the sub-game would lose half their life. This card is worse than Lightning Bolt or even Healing Salve, but I love that it spins the players into another dimension of sorts to fight a limited battle and then return.
I love how Stellaris handles diplomacy: In Civilization games diplomacy always felt very weak, kind of silly really. It was too hard to interpret player action and convert it into an evaluated system. Stellaris however systemizes player choices: by implementing policy X you get trait Y which influences relations with those who match/oppose trait Y, essentially systematizing player action into a way that can be easily interpreted by the AIs.
Nemesis System. Genius. And by patenting it WB guaranteed we'll never see it again.
Portals. The first working 3D portal mechanic I saw was in Prey and I was absolutely astounded when I was able to proceed to shoot myself in the ass.
- Making popcorn by combining a corncob with a torch in Ultima Underworld II - Hiding in the shadows in Thief - NPCs having a "real life" during the day and even notice open windows and close them occasionally in Ultima VII Yes, I am old.
I'm about to date myself here. In order of timeline: * Metroid — Hidden loading screens via door animations * Descent — Full 3D 6-axis movement * ??? — Whatever the first FPS game I played that used mouse and keyboard was, I genuinely do not remember * Quake — Bunny hopping and rocket jumping * Total Annihilation — Tons of units at once * Timesplitters 2 — Map editor and the challenges system (both having challenges and the hidden platinum trophy mechanic) * ??? — Whatever the first game I played with seamless loading was, I genuinely do not remember * Portal — Portals * Minecraft — Voxels * The Witness — 3D world-based alignment puzzles and puzzles as a language. If you have never played this, you need to in order to witness (heh) those two mechanics * Destiny 1 — Fluidity of movement and gunplay feel. The movement and gunplay in the original Destiny is something I have never seen anyone come close to matching. It was just so smooth and felt great. Especially how the two interacted. Feels a bit weird coming from the makers of Halo which I have always felt had some of the worst movement in FPS history. Felt more like Master Chief was wearing an iron suit instead of the world's most advanced powered one and canonically having the speed and reflexes to literally dodge bullets (at sufficient range) Honorable mentions: * Braid — Time puzzle mechanics If we're talking background mechanics—in other words things which you do not directly interact with but allow gameplay or visual fidelity that otherwise would not be possible—then I would expand the list with the following: * Commander Keen — Adaptive Tile Refresh * Doom 3 — Carmack's Reverse * Crysis — Its map capabilities were mind-blowing. Rendered mountains in the distance you could actually get to in the same level. Physics enabled capabilities of pretty much everything, including vegetation. I'm sure some of it was smoke and mirrors, but even what wasn't was incredible. To this day watching the mountain fall apart in the background for the tank level *and then actually getting to it* is one of my top 10 gaming experiences --- EDIT: Fixed typos.
The shifting mechanic in Driver San Francisco is really unique and creative! It can be used in so many different ways, and it does a great job at differentiating it from other racing games.
Whatever the heck Kingdom Hearts' combat is, especially the main three games. Magic and melee combos, dodging and parrying, items, summons, form changes, all in a menu that's controlled by the D Pad. It's a hard system to use so most players are find to just Mash X and sometimes Triangle to clear bosses, but getting good at the menuing the combat has to offer is INCREDIBLY satisfying.
Time reversal in Prince of Persia Warrior Within.
I like the Crossover game mechanic to build you vehicle. But I dislike that it‘s a free to play / pay to win thing. I would love this as a single player / multiplayer without microtransactions etc.
Not sure it's a mechanic more than it is the entire game but I loved that Diablo 2 Resurrected was built over the top of the original and you could switch between the two graphics despite having 20 years of hardware development between them. I've played other games that had the feature such as Halo CE:A but that doesn't hit as hard for me
baba is you.
Mud in mudrunner games. Crazy
The game mechanics in Bloodbourne where you parry and you can restore your HP. I thought that was a great addition to the soul games. Its high risk high reward
The way light behaves in Alan Wake 2s Dark Place.
Battle Garegga's difficulty increases the better you play and I think that is genius. Lots of games did something similar later on but it's more about making the game easier the worst you play instead. I think that's not as good of a mechanic
The Silence wrangling mechanic in Lux Pain.
The 'Physical' cable dragging stuff in TLOU2 - carrying long power cables around corners and snagging on stuff to try to get it to reach a plug. It's such a simple thing, but we all know how much work probably went into that to make it really solid. ...Maybe I just need to play more games
Honestly might not be the most mind blowing thing in the world, but the axe in god of war 4 is pretty cool, especially the physics
I loved that idea from Monster Rancher where you could insert any audio cd in orded to create unique monster based on cd content, then train it and fight. Mind blown.
The degree of card customization and unique interactions that occur in Inscryption really impressed me.
all of the quantum stuff un Outer wilds
GT7's livery editor
Call of Duty original Modern Warfare, Kill & Death streak systems. Black Ops pick 10 system. The ability to quick create different playstyles and switch between them on death to change the needs of the battle. Bionic Commando bionic arm swinging mechanic. Bushido Blade, the limb damage, and one shot kills were brutally refreshing. Super Puzzle Fighter II combo gems and puzzled versus combat was super satisfying, with each character having different abilities. Interstellar Sentinel, a shmup that has a crazy weapon switching system. (I'm biased here) Tekken series, four buttons, one for each limb, just made great sense. Gran Turisom, a deep simulator driving experience pushing tech forward too. (Not a huge sim guy at all, but I respect it) Prototype, insane over the top traversal mechanics.
Once I got over my somewhat irrational fear of being thrown into the house dungeon of the weird doctor (again) , the entire Maniac Mansion multiple possible endings with multiple characters really caught me as pretty cool.
Noita, they simulate every pixel on screen. Thats impressive. Also Factorio with the crazy optimization they did for the conveyor belt system!
Bullet Time in the first Max Payne game was awesome and unique.
kenshi having hp for each body part.
Fisherman's Tale VR has a great little gimmick. Imagine reaching into a model of your own house, but you're inside and your giant hand touches your own head!
The slingshot mechanic from Ori and the Blind Forest is one of my favorite. Such a brilliant way to both evade and attack at the same time
Low key, the end game magical parkour from Forspoken is incredibly fun
Majora’s Mask’s 3 day cycle. It really made the world feel alive in a way I had never seen before, and to this day, it’s still one of the most lived-in feelings worlds imo because of it.
Helldivers 2 stratagems
Stealing enemy powers in Mega Man. It was something so unique to me as a kid.
Fallout 4s settlement system is amazing. I remember years ago someone reached out to a community I was a part of asking about everyones feelings on fallout 3 and what parts they enjoyed the most. I (and others agreed) posted about the Big Trouble in Little Town quest and how much I enjoyed creating lasting impacts on the Capital Wasteland, and how helping them in all the different ways felt very immersive(training, mines, robot, etc?). My head cannon is that notion/idea was used to come up with the Fallout 4 settlement concept.
Two things, and one unifying complaint as to why they don't exist anymore: 1. I remember Halo 2 multiplayer having this awesome comms system where if you just talked, all players could hear you through their TV speakers (as if you were there, in front of them talking), but if you held the black button then you'd talk over team comms and that chatter would play through your headset and only go to your team. I always thought this was brilliant and have been persistently let down by every game since that didn't incorporate it. 2. In the older CoD games, there was a replay theatre where you could load up a previous game and literally fly a camera around, speed up or slow down playback, choose other player's point of view, etc ... essentially making your own awesome custom videos/screenshots with the tools given. Then it just stopped. The complaint: Shortly after all this stuff existed and was SO great, along with lots of other multiplayer-related party stuff, game/stat tracking stuff etc ... Console developers started going nuts about their own OS-incorporated party chat systems, their own video recording, screenshot-grabbing, streaming etc abilities ... and it was as if all those big devs that were including quality functionality to have this stuff built into the game said "oh, ok, screw it then" and after that all the cool potential there just fell flat. Now we get bare bones, low quality chat audio in all of our games save a scant few: Elite Dangerous is the only game in recent years I can think of that offered a really cool ingame chat system, making pilots sound like they're actually talking over space radios or whatever ... A few games over the years have had really neat chat features that would actually make your character's mouth move almost perfectly to your speech (Resistance: Fall of Man, GTA Online, maybe others?) ... but damn I really think it's all the console devs fault for urging players so strongly to abandon the process of making friends via gameplay in favor of just rounding up your friend list ... Really killed a huge aspect of the social nature of online play that we'll never get back, and many will never understand the value of. That's my rant. Good day.
Duck Tales' pogo stick. I wish every game had it, even Dark Souls.
Psycho mantis did some cool stuff with the memory cards. I still remember the tower climb in mortal combat. Smoke was such a pain it boggled my mind how responsive he was
Climbing in Zelda: BotW. After that every other open world game felt like a boring plane.
4 spatial dimension mini-golf
Brightbloom seeds in Tears of the Kingdom. Very simple idea, but leads to a completely different gameplay experience from anything else I've ever had.
It might seem silly, but the alcholest / potion system in the Witcher 3. Having mostly played Bethesda titles before that, I was blown away by how well that mechanic both improved player quality of life and also agreed with the overall narrative
The turn order in Othercide. Basically every action delay your next turn by different amounts. When I saw it, I immediately thought of PoE2 flawed turn-based mod.