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. 
The Pokemon Contests (using the Pokemon’s moveset to appeal to judges, rather than combat) from Ruby Sapphire was my favourite part about those games. I wish they’d bring them back.
My partner LOVES Pokemon contests but not the bad ORAS remake ones. Their favorites were in Diamond and Pearl because you dress up your Pokemon and they thought it was cute. They say “there are dozens of us”
I skipped Diamond and Pearl! Gunna have to play them now they sound dope. And your partner has good taste
I miss battle revolution. The fully customizable trainers were great. I had a body builder I have the little kid lines for. “BE MY FRIEND” with the Pikachu facepaint on the Schwarzenegger body was a crowd pleaser
Splitscreen, level editors, and also unlockable costumes/skins for doing certain things (side missions, achievements, that kinda stuff).
A non remake immersive sim. Prey 2017 scratched that itch and mankind divided didn’t have the same charm as human revolution (and all of the same problems mostly)
I don’t game as much but in that vein of discovery and intrigue I really enjoy Tunic
I love the dynamic music in Street Fighter 6!
I don’t know that I would call it a “novelty” but I really miss when MMORPGs would try to strive for being as immersive and fantastic as possible, before they all became varying degrees of WoW clones that instead try to sell themselves on boring grinds to get excessively flashy armor and gigantic ugly mounts.
I miss the wierd immersive MMO but also I’m old and have obligations and wikis are too easy to access now, I don’t think I’d really enjoy them any more even if they made a comeback, at least not as much or in the same way
MUDS or multi user dungeons scratch that itch for an immersive fantasy mmorpg. I played around a bit with TorilMud and quite enjoyed it.
Dope, I will look into this.
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
when your inventory was this little “tetris” game , where you had to arrange your loot accordingly
I love that shit! So I’m going to give you 3 modern games that have some of that. Also they’re 3 of my favorite games ever:
Pathologic 2, Dredge, and Subnautica
I don’t know if you’ve played any of them, but I can highly recommend all 3 (if you buy Dredge, don’t buy either DLC, they’re straight up not worth it).
I keep plugging Jump Super Stars in these threads, it’s a DS platform fighter that’s also a deck-builder, where your deck is actually a page of various-shaped comic panels. You have limited space to work with, stronger things are bigger and might have weird shapes, and adjacent panels can interact to make arrangement even more complex. Super, super cool idea that I’ve never seen anything like it since.
Have you seen Backpack Battles? It’s an autobattler that’s 90% inventory tetris.
I’ve played way too much of it.
Doesn’t Tarkov still do that?
The patent expired for loading screen mini games didn’t it. How come those never came back?
SSDs have made loading screens a short lived experience. If you have a spinning disk still you’re out of luck.
To be fair, if you’ve built a computer recently, ssd prices have dropped like a rock.
Good point. I still feel nostalgic though
You could still squeeze a Wario Ware microgame into one of them.
I think it would be hard to fit a minigame into a loading screen without making the loading screen longer due to loading the minigame, though. Like it’d be easy enough if you were coding your loading system from scratch, but modern games are mostly built using big pre-existing engines, which are full of their own assumptions about how loading works.
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!
Still think the best dynamic music was banjo kazooie. It feels like every level is 1 orchestral piece and you can run around the level to navigate parts of the songs. Gorgeous
Pretty respectable that they managed it on a console wih basically the worst sound capabilities short of the GBA
Level builders/editors
Splitscreen
K/D ratio - I know it’s still in a lot of games but quite a few mainstream shooters have removed it
Aim assist being in everything - if it’s crossplay, sure, level the playing field, but if it’s console v console there’s no need for that shit.
Level builders/editors
They’re a lot harder to make with modern / 3D games.
But they also seem to boost a game’s long-term audience by a lot, so it’s weird they’re not more common.
…I should make something that needs a level editor instead of always doing procedural stuff.
I’m no expert - what makes them harder with 3D?
From a layman’s perspective isn’t it just giving your users access to a bunch of assets - I suppose streamlining the creating process to be user friendly is the difficulty. I can make a custom Far Cry map no problem, but GMOD or Skyrim I was at a total loss with their creation software.
FarCry does a pretty good job. I don’t mind if it’s all a bit janky and you have to find creative workarounds to problems. GTA V seemed to also have a lot of good custom maps.
That’s pretty much it, it’s a push-pull between streamlining for sane folks and raw power/control for insane folks. Also the first one takes extra dev time since devs are insane by definition and so are already using the raw tools.
K/D ratio - I know it’s still in a lot of games but quite a few mainstream shooters have removed it
Having been there and played those, I think I know why so many have removed it, considering what the most
tended to do with it both as a rhetorical bludgeon and a justification for bullying and harassment.yeah I know the reason but the solution should be to just have better moderation around harassment rather than taking away a competitive element
just have better moderation around harassment rather than taking away a competitive element
I’ve seen large games with large budgets try to do that but the harassment just got more passive aggressive and gamified, dodging standards of moderation such as using “do you need help?” emoting hotkey prompts over and over again and the like. I don’t think those games need that sacred number more than they need players that don’t quit because they’re made miserable by the “competitive element.”
Chances are the super hardcore noscope Xtreme games specifically intended for aggressively toxic
still have K/D ratios listed anyway so it’s not like every game requires them. Clearly they don’t now.couldn’t you just mute whoever was giving you grief?
The sacred number let’s a player know if what they’re doing is working.
It also gives a number for your friends to rib you for - if you’ve got a 5kd you’re a sweaty nerd and if you’re 0.5 then you’re a trash tier noob. Just a bit of fun.
My k/d varies from 0.5-2 depending on the game, and that’s fine. If someone says I’m shite at call of duty, well, they aren’t wrong. If they’re going to annoy me about it they get a mute. No problemo. 2 clicks and it’s done. In a decade of playing COD I’ve never actually had to do that.
I’ve only ever received abuse in tryhard games like DOTA, and once again, mute and done. Why remove long standing features of games when you could just leave it up to the players to decide?
couldn’t you just mute whoever was giving you grief?
Until and unless it is followed up by in-game griefing or disrupting the game because of pissing contests, sure.
But again my point still stands: the games that abolished officially posted K/D ratios did it for player retention purposes. The “couldn’t you just mute them” attitude clearly wasn’t keeping those players being harassed by sweaty “hardcore”
around. Couldn’t you just play games that kept K/D ratios?The sacred number let’s a player know if what they’re doing is working.
Yes, and many players that you’re ignoring and/or invalidating don’t want some random sweaty
to “let them know what they’re doing is working.”It also gives a number for your friends to rib you for
Yes, and that “ribbing” is where the toxicity and harassment of strangers in particular comes in and why games that don’t have K/D ratios officially in them made that decision.
and that’s fine. If someone says I’m shite at call of duty, well, they aren’t wrong. If they’re going to annoy me about it they get a mute. No problemo. 2 clicks and it’s done. In a decade of playing COD I’ve never actually had to do that.
That sounds like a very old and tired “you would not have survived the good old days lobbies I come from where I was tempered in the fires of N-word screaming” internet warrior take.
I’ve only ever received abuse in tryhard games like DOTA, and once again, mute and done. Why remove long standing features of games
Why do you need the tryhard thing in games that are clearly trying to retain players that aren’t tryhards. The thing is already removed and apparently the games and their playerbases are fine enough with that to keep on keeping on.
when you could just leave it up to the players to decide?
It seems that you want to decide for other people that you’ve already ignored and/or invalidated, all because of your personal desire to “rib” them and “let them know what they’re doing is working.”
Again, clearly the games that opted out of K/D ratios did it because in the balance they would rather keep more “casual” players instead of have them quit and go somewhere else over the almighty mandate of “ribbing” them to “let them know what they’re doing is working” and that they’re “shite” and other exhausting
shit.Yeah it was for player retention, but also a lot of the people they were retaining are probably kids that shouldn’t be on the game in the first place. Player retention under capitalism isn’t out of pride for the franchise or friendliness - it’s to maximise profits. Look at franchise shooters these days - I’m not begging for a return to the ‘piss filter’ days of the 2000’s but every game is marketed with a battlepass full of flashy camos and colours and epic wacky outfits because they explicitly want an audience of children (despite the game officially being 16+). Games feel infected by all of this hyperstimulating garbage (I know that’s what gaming is in the first place, but it’s worse than ever), and every game is more than ever chasing trends that Fortnite started. I know that’s a tangent, but it feels like it comes under the same area.
It’s not a serious issue - it’s just preference. BF2042 was the first Battlefield to do it and I picked it up recently, and it just feels weird not being able to check how you’re doing. Kills are wrapped up with assists at the end of game - but you can get an assist by knocking 1HP off a guy or possibly even just ‘spotting’ them. You can only see your OWN KDA in certain game modes. It’s just strange. I’m not going to stop playing my favourite franchise because of it, but on top of all the other 2042 issues it just feels strange.
It only sounds like ‘cod lobby veteran’ shit if you read it that way - I said the complete opposite. I can’t remember a single time I’ve had toxicity in over a decade of COD. Especially not gameplay - there isn’t even really a way to grief in such an Arcadey shooter as COD - maybe in the new Warzone mode but I’ve never put hours into that.
I don’t know why you’re trying to paint me as some internet smuglord trash talker - back when I played dota I had thousands of commends for friendliness. In battlefield I sacrifice my KD to get revives and keep the team rolling. I like team stuff. It’s why I’m bad at COD - it’s much more of a solo game. I’ve always been a positive mental attitude player. I’m not letting people know they need to get better - I want that KD for my own personal information. If some guys gone 96/5, maybe I should go follow them for a round and see what they’re getting up to. Would probably have a good time tearing up the map and supporting in their wake. I specified that the ribbing is reserved to your friends.
It seems like you’ve twisted what I’m saying to epicly PWN me for the hexpoints ratio.
I don’t need to “twist” anything to point out the fact that you outright dismissed any player that is not interested in K/D ratios or getting harassed over them. Sure, you say you aren’t and wouldn’t and haven’t been doing it, but clearly enough games have been made that opted out of them to signify that there was a problem even if it wasn’t specifically from you in particular. Further, it seems those games are not dismissing or downplaying those concerns like you are doing.
You were apparently demanding that everyone participate in something that only a categorically smaller group is interested in, and want your “ribbing” and “letting them know what they’re doing is working” and “shite” notifications to take precedent over them enjoying the game, and brush off concerns with “they can just mute.”
Clearly those games and the playerbases that continue to play them are fine with it that way.
It seems like you’ve twisted what I’m saying to epicly PWN me for the hexpoints ratio.
No. I ignore the upbear count, as I ignore K/D ratio pissing contests until and unless they’re used to harass, bully, belittle, or just be toxic in chat channels. Similarly, upbear counts here tend to only get brought up for toxic bullshit metatheory nonsense that I, again, prefer to ignore until it gets dredged up in moments like this.
Also, as you had already put it to dismiss other players’ concerns, you can just “mute” me if you must and move on.
Aim assist being in everything - if it’s crossplay, sure, level the playing field, but if it’s console v console there’s no need for that shit.
I love aim assist. It just needs to be reframed as an accessibility option. Especially with gamepads, having some tracking and magnetism makes games where you have to aim so much more enjoyable. My wrists and thumbs just aren’t doing the same things any more as when I was younger.
It’s probably not easy to find the balance, but in any single player or casual multiplayer game it is a very welcome sight.
You would love Lucio from Overwatch. His entire kit is built around dynamic music and how you’re playing the game at any given moment. He acts as the center of a large aura that either gives a passive speed increase or a passive healing stream. You can cross fade between the two tracks whenever you want with no limitation giving you a choice later on whether to amplify one or the other. You can even cross fade while you’re amplifying.
The character’s ultimate is just a bass drop that animation locks you into slamming the ground. I didn’t even mention that you’re a sci-fi roller blading support that can wall ride around the map. You can bass drop off the walls or just whatever high place you can. Nobody gets mad at you for looking cool as fuck.
The music is sick definitely take a listen!
uns uns uns uns
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.
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.
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.
The Ultima series, for a time, had Inventory Where’s Waldo.
In some old CRPGs like Fallout 2 there was a bar to type in keywords to skip to conversation trees about specific topics. I don’t see that nowadays, but always preferred it in more dialogue heavy games.
SSX 3 is one of my favorite all-time games and the dynamic music was one of the reasons. Not only is the soundtrack full of amazing artists and songs, elements of the tracks duck or swell contextually. As you soar into massive air tricks, the lyrics drop out and then the music crescendos when you nail the landing. When you glide through an ice cave, the leads and highs hush and the bass and rhythm push like an underground river until you reach the surface and the other tracks rush back in. It’s great.
That was just a perfect game
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
