EDIT: Seems dynamic music is back in style in some very recent games, many of which I haven’t really played yet. Good. 
For me, it’s dynamic music, the kind that some games had that adjusted moment by moment to what was happening in the game.
The best-known example of this in the 90s game TIE Fighter, where the moment more enemy (or allied) ships showed up the music would have a little additional flourish to acknowledge the shift in battle. There were pre-battle tension tracks, battle music, complications of battle, grandiose flourishes for the arrival of enemy or even allied capital ships, and victory and failure music all ready to flow into the next seconds of the game.
A lesser-known but still excellent example of this was in Ultima Underworld and its sequel, where drawing a weapon had its own special “preparing for battle” tension music, getting attacked had a jump-out-of-your-skin joltingly sudden musical start that actually scared me as a kid when I got ambushed, music for battles going well, going poorly, victory and defeat.
I wish more games did those sort of second by second musical changes, but they’ve sort of fallen out of fashion for the most part. 
Cheat codes. They’re mostly just DLC and seasonal passes now.
Game manuals. You used to have a short novella that came with the game. Some games like Wasteland 1, the manual was part of the game itself. Now you get jack shit.
I miss when games like Goldeneye were contemporary and had lots of cool unlocks from playing the game.
Kirby Air Ride still has my favorite unlock system ever, it was a huge grid of hidden achievements and when you completed one it would reveal the four adjacent achievements. You’d get the first few by complete accident because there were freebies like “finish 1 race” “finish 1 race on X vehicle” and then your unlocks would spread outward across the board with a nice satisfying SLAM SLAM SLAM revealing them one-by-one after each race.
Some of the Smash Bros games had the same system, with the added mechanic that you also unlocked a small number of hammers that could unlock squares without having gotten the achievement for it
That’s actually from Air Ride too! 5 of the squares rewarded purple checks you could use to unlock another square for free
Oh neat
When Resident Evil Village had points you could earn to unlock weapons and shit i practically did a backflip on the spot. Same thing for Guilty Gear Strive.
Part of why Tunic is so great. The manual is a part of the game.
I have so many video game manuals, mostly because i would rent a game, take the manual out, read it, put it down, and forget to put it back in its case. So now i have a bag full of manuals for games from shuttered rental stores.
Also had multiple notebooks full of cheat codes, but i’m pretty sure everyone had those.
Ragdoll physics have kinda fallen by the wayside but they’re so much fun
I feel like gibs aren’t really a thing anymore. Are gibs still a thing?
they are but mostly if youre playing a retro style shooter. (dusk, nightmare reaper, etc)
Yeeting unconscious people was one of the few fun parts of Deus Ex 2.
Never liked ragdoll something about it was always off to me. Though it is funny to see Niko Bellic flying through a windshield.
ngl ragdoll physics are only really fun when they’re janky as shit, bouncing way further than they should or clipping into geometry and thrashing around
without that they’re not that noticeable and perhaps even a downgrade from good animation work
What do you mean? I struggle to think of a recent game that doesn’t have ragdoll physics if at least somewhat appropiate (i.e. it’s not a 2D-Plattformer or something)
LAN gaming
DS download play was a weird and welcome oasis of LAN play/spawn copy installs and I miss it so much
The DS (and 3DS) and its versatility makes me want to get into light hacking sometimes.
Hotseat too!
Inventory Tetris. Whenever a game has the player carry stuff in hammerspace it’s almost always done by using a weight system like how Bethesda does it. I want resident evil style inventory where items can take up multiple space slots.
Please play Backpack Battles. Totally awesome if you love trying to place your items optimally.
The Ultima series, for a time, had Inventory Where’s Waldo.
The game God of Weapons has a whole inventoy management section with inventory tetris. Its a bullet heaven game similar to Vampire Survivors.
Some indie im sims also have it. Gloomwood has it, I think. Blood West has it as well.
There is also a mod for Project Zomboid that turns inventory management to be tetris instead of weight based, and integrates gear mods as well.
Indie games are just better.
i love this feature too, i’m gonna implement this when i make a game that will have inventories
I made a comment about this elsewhere in the thread, but let me repeat myself here. Pathologic 2, Dredge, and Subnautica all have this. And they’re all spectacular games well worth playing. If you haven’t tried them, I would suggest it. For Dredge though, don’t buy the DLCs, they are not worth the money.
I feel like cel shading never took off they way it could have. Outside of anime style games it seems like it always takes a back seat to realism which sucks because it’s looks rad as hell. XIII and Viewtiful Joe are two examples that stick out in my memory, plus Wind Waker pissed off so many Zelda fans who wanted a grimdark Peter Jackson LoZ game. It was great.
I agree, I miss cell shading and wish it was more common.
It’s really difficult to make it not look bad in many cases, it often comes out blotchy
While technically not cel shaded. The Borderlands series uses a comic artstyle very much inspired by it. That would be a big one.
Hi-Fi Rush if a recent non-anime game that is cel shaded but it still has a tinge of anime vibes.
I never actually owned Viewtiful Joe, but I did have the demo disc and I played through it like a million times. Loved the shit out of that demo.
BOMB RUSH CYBERFUNK
I must say BRC is the finest game ever made and it slaps
Virtual Pets in games. Like the mag system in Phantasy Star Online or the Chao in Sonic Adventure, such a fun way to waste time, especially since I already enjoy v-pets.
Cool comrade, bookmarking this
Damn, sick af. I have a pokemon simulator I was working on that didn’t get past the initial stages, but I would love to eventually get it to a more “playable” state. If only I had the time and drive
Oh, the PSO mags. Takes me back.
Final Fantasy VIII even had a chocobo v-pet you could put on the pocket station but it never came to the states.
The PC CD-ROM version had it as a desktop game
Most recent one that comes to mind for me is in Monster Hunter World, where you have a sidekick cat that you can dress up. Still not a full pet experience like the Chao garden tho.
One of my least favourite things in the entertainment industry is when a new innovative or interesting thing is in an otherwise mediocre/terrible product, its used as a justification to never do it again. Of course, you can go far in the other direction and assume that because something is different means it is “good”, whatever that means. I appreciate artistic risk taking tho
There’s probably a decent number of random mechanics in RTSes that got used once and then never again. I remember Act of War had the prisoner mechanic, which encouraged aggressive risk taking play. It was present in the sequel but I think they could have leaned into it further. Not that any random mechanic is going to be generally applicable. I always wanted RTSes to be more asymmetric but that’s harder for balance and the marketing of “competitive” ranked play.
A mechanic I really enjoyed in a recent game was from Enlisted. It’s a competitive (as in, you’re playing against other humans) first person shooter, but your respawns are your bot squad. Most of the time when you’re shooting at a rando crossing a field, it’s a bot. This experience meant that even the worst players were getting kills and having an effect (by killing the better players respawns). I’m not terrible but not that good at FPSes either, but I found the experience way less frustrating overall. The rest of the game was mid. Freemium. But I’d be interested to see that in other games.
I remember an old game called Metal Fatigue, which had a battle layers mechanic. Obviously many city/base builders have had this for ages, but I could totally see it in a modern imagining of the current Palestinian thing. Having a multilayered tunnelling mechanic to fight over.
I think overall when I’m playing non-competitive indie games, my main gripe is usually “I wish this game was the same except for this thing from another game”. Modding is generally less available nowadays, and I’m not the most amazing coder so remaking the whole game with the extra mechanic from scratch isn’t really an option (probably).
Metal Fatigue also had a nice system of putting mechas together out of individual parts, which you could steal and reverse-engineer from the enemy factions. That game maybe had a few too many mechanics going on, but I had a lot of fun with it.
Yeah, good stuff.
I always wanted RTSes to be more asymmetric but that’s harder for balance and the marketing of “competitive” ranked play.
The Goo faction in Gray Goo is cool as fuck, your “base” is just this big mobile amorphous blob that engulfs and digests resource nodes and even enemies that touch it. It can split into more copies of itself or smaller, faster blobs that further divide into your actual specialized units. Everything is a slick-looking liquid metal with glowing cyber hexagons running across the surface and eerie creaking/bending metal sound effects.
Yeah, petroglyph leaned into it for both Universe at War and Grey Goo. I always felt like the games felt kinda junky, but I appreciated the effort in making the factions feel substantially different.
Fun fact: the bloom post-processing effect was popularized by a Gamasutra article by the programmers of Tron 2.0, a game which received mostly middling reviews and has since largely been forgotten.
I’ll say that one of the most interesting and enjoyable shooter experiences I’ve ever had was the beta version of a game called Ace of Spades that was developed by one guy who built the engine from scratch. It was literally just minecraft with guns, but the very limited set of tools (the best gun was a rifle that fired perfectly straight and had no scope) and enormous open spaces resulted in an experience that was both slow and tense.
(Um, I don’t know why your post triggered me into writing this pitch for a wishlist game. Maybe the minecraft with guns bit? idk, I got excited)
I have this pitch for a builder game where you’re a military procurement/engineering firm. The LoD would be about what Stormworks has (25cm blocks, or maybe 20 or 10 cm), you spend time fiddling around with air fuel ratios and stuff. You’d be able to fiddle with various war nerd numbers on vehicles you create, but there wouldn’t be much for you to do with the vehicles directly. Instead, you teach bots how to use the vehicle (some sort of waypointing system, some vehicle tests like turning, acceleration etc etc). After that, your vehicle and usage data is compiled and a little war goes on in the background. Hypothetically, this war would be happening on another screen or you could refer to it. Because the vehicle is compiled into this RTS mode and not run as a physics simulation (or at least, would be run as a very cut down simulation), that section would be quite light. Possibly multiple layers to examine (strategic, operational, tactical). Your vehicles would have logistical strain (e.g. fuel, maintenance/wear, damage from fire etc). You’d probably want to define a few other variables on how its used (e.g. This is a TANK, GENERAL PURPOSE, SWARM or something). I don’t think it would be possible for an AI to account for all ways people would design vehicles and use-cases, but the basic classes are pretty standard nowadays, and people could request things that feel plausible to the dev.
A few reasons for doing it this way: Having it so that the vehicle is tested by itself on multiple predictable scenarios means the physics simulation (e.g. denting, beams bending etc) can be more detailed, and allows for more complicated vehicles. Once its “compiled” so that the bots can use it, it will run quite light (this is sort of explored in From The Depths, but not to its fullest extent)
You’d watch combat and take notes on what works well and what does, and work on new designs as the war gets under way. Your new designs that you produce and test would percolate through the logistics system and slowly start appearing on the front.
There’d also be a little thing where you could define your squads that the AI uses in the war (e.g. 12 dudes, 1 command, 2 fireteams, each fireteam has a LAW and 5 assault rifles, command has 1 commander and 2 machine guns etc), with some reference to real world stuff. This would obviously be important for transport vehicles and logistics.
There’d be a mode where you’d have to do it “in real time” (i.e. no pausing for designing), a more freeform creative mode where you can design and save freely without worrying about wars and launch battles with your vehicle instantly, and a thing where you could compile all of your designs into a faction. Presumably, the game would ship with a few real world referenced factions, people could mod in their own ones. And people could also mod in maps that the AI will fight wars on, and opponent factions (of varying degrees of fairness). Tutorial mode, build a truck that carries a squad. It’s an electric truck so you don’t have to program a gearbox.
It’s probably a bit beyond me as a coder (maybe, idk, the primary time I was trying to learn coding was when I had pretty severe depression), but maybe as a fresh godot project if applicable? I think it would absolutely kill amongst a certain sort of war nerd.
General Dynamics: The Game.
Arma has a similar respawn system, if you want it to. Controlling the AI is way, way less streamlined than Enlisted though
Even Battlefield itself barely used it, but destructible environments. I played both Bad Company games and the destruction was great. Battlefield 3, as much as I love the game, regressed when it came to destructible environments. I barely played BF4 but I remember they made some maps have scripted destruction.
The finals makes it work quite well, honestly. Wish it was more like a normal war game instead sometimes though.
I seriously do not understand why this isn’t more of a thing. Red Faction: Guerilla pulled of the destruction mechanic to near perfection in 2009, it cannot be a technical problem at this point
If I recall, Battlefield 3 and 4 had urban maps that seemed to at the time limit their ability for destruction.
Well-done destructible environments are a ton of fun! I played Control recently and absolutely loved the destruction that would result after a tough encounter. So much fun
I need to finish that. I got stuck on some boss and then got distracted by another game.
Yeah, it’s a pretty decent game, I enjoyed it. Do you happen to remember what boss you got stuck at? I personally struggled most with Salvador and Mold-1. Absolute nightmares, those fights, at least for me.
It’s been like 3 years lol. Just gonna start again.
I’m not sure what you’re talking about, because dynamic contextual music is pretty damn standard nowadays, especially for bigger budget titles. DOOM 2016 and DOOM Eternal made extensive use of it. BG3 does it.
They do have it, yes. I suppose I should rephrase it as “want to see it more again” because there was a decades-long dry spell of boring orchestral bits.
The arcade experience. I remember that feeling of walking into a new arcade and just spending hours discovering shit. Walking down the line and seeing some faves, then seeing some crazy machine you’ve never seen and popping in a quarter ands hooting bad guys together with a wisecracking rando.
Arcades also let you readily and cheaply engage with physical mechanics. You might crawl onto a motorbike and physically tilt your body to steer, dance like a nut until you were sweating and panting, or crawl INSIDE of a jeep and shoot dinosaurs with a mate while velociraptors roar behind you.in surround sound
Most shit still present in TF2 like:
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Open chat. I like to get in rivalries and talk shit with the enemy team.
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Server setups. It could be a pain to find a good server with room, but it meant you could pick a tryhard server for a while, maybe go back to your usual spot and meetup with the gang, then try some server that solos your favorite map 24/7, before taking a bite and trying out one with crazy
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Mods. Maybe somebody had a half-finished mario kart server. Or a randomizer where you got a random gun and attributes.
Server setups need to make a comeback.
Imagine Elden Ring, but you open the server browser and get a list like
- scrunglyguysTradeServer [random enemy locations] [500% movement speed]
- BetterEldenRing [all bosses replaced with Burial Watchdogs]
- storymode [x100 weapon damage] [no enemy agro]
- ObnoxousOverTheTopDifficult [no spells] [no miracles] [no items] [no dodge roll]
TF2 made me obnoxious going over into other games, since most of the servers I was in were basically VR chat where we’d harass anyone for actually grabbing the flag and advancing the game.
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Dynamic music is absolutely still a thing, I’m not even sure where you got the idea it went away. Street Fighter 6 is an easy example of round-by-round change, and literal second-by-second changes (I think really generation?) are used in non-setpiece parts of BotW and BotW 1.5. It’s even more overt in Untitled Goose Game.
That’s good then. I haven’t bought as many new games recently as I used to, and in the years before that there was a bit of a dry spell of canned “epic” orchestral tracks without dynamic features.
Yeah, even the TIE Fighter remake on the X-Wing vs TIE Fighter engine just had generic Williams score playing and it was a huge bummer.
That was around the start of a long dry spell of disappointment for me. I’m glad dynamic music is making a comeback now, according to people in this thread.
Removed by mod
DS Download play was the shit and it sucks that it hasn’t been used more.
Hell yeah! Only one person needs to have the cartridge.
Heavy moddability and easy to make player bots for solo play. I played so many hours on jedi knight 1 with the insane amount of mods and player made single player levels.
all my UT2K4 hours were before I used steam or anything that tracked play time, so I sometimes wonder how many hours I had in that game. it’s gotta be in the 4-digit range
I don’t know how common it is but it’s certainly not dead, it’s a staple of Mario games and lately I’ve been playing Returnal which has some fucking rad dynamic music.
Anyway my answer is “not being a walled garden.” I appreciate having official servers that don’t suck ass and matchmaking and meticulous balance and stuff like that, but I’ll trade it all in a heartbeat for a server browser full of 900 ping russian hosts and easy-to-mod json/xml files.
