I was trying to think of which games created certain mechanics that became popular and copied by future games in the industry.

The most famous one that comes to my mind is Assassin’s Creed, with the tower climbing for map information.

  • @[email protected]
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    410 months ago

    Im pretty sure the actual, physical Trading card games like MtG and Pokemon gave us all these games with card mechanics in the late 90s/early 2000s.

    Culdcept (1997), Baiten Kaitos (2003), Kingdom Hearts - Chain of Memories (2004). Then the card games weren’t as popular for a bit, then the digital ones died out.

    And then Blizzard released Hearthstone in 2014. I haven’t played the other ones to know for sure, but I believe Yu-Gi-Oh Master duels crafting system can directly trace it’s roots to it. Trade cards for dust of a specific rarity, dust from 3 can form a new card, Shiny cards give enough dust on their own for any card, etc. .

    • nocturne
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      210 months ago

      I really thought hearthstone came out much easier than 2014.

      • @[email protected]
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        210 months ago

        I think it had like a year long beta where people were playing before full release. I know I was personally playing in 2013.

        • nocturne
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          210 months ago

          I remember playing WoW and working on getting all of the battle pets available by playing other blizzard games. But I thought this was in 2012. There was at least one obtained by playing hearthstone.

  • noughtnaut
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    10 months ago

    Dune II - basically the grandfather of every RTS game out there (and incidentally very, very different from Dune I): opposing forces, resource collection, tech tree, fog of war, et cetera. Or perhaps it was (not World of) Warcraft, it’s been too long and memory gets fuzzy.

        • @[email protected]
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          410 months ago

          They might be closest, but they’re still pretty far off. One of the core pillars of Arkham combat is that it would punish you for button mashing by dropping your combo, meaning you not only gain fewer points at the end of combat but also lose access to your instant finishers, which are all too valuable for taking out the toughest opponents. Spider-Man is happy to let you mindlessly mash, and it’s far worse off for it.

          • VindictiveJudge
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            410 months ago

            Might just be because I’m just starting out, but Spider-Man’s combat is much more punishing for me. Could just be the higher emphasis on using specific combos on certain enemies, which I have some difficulty keeping straight.

      • @[email protected]
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        110 months ago

        i think Shadow of Mordor did actually. the system was pretty similar but it didn’t feel as magnetic, which is an improvement.

        • @[email protected]
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          110 months ago

          I did like the magnetic nature of Arkham, and since Mordor lacked it, they let you hold your combo streak for longer, which also made it too easy.

          • @[email protected]
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            110 months ago

            yeah i don’t care so much about ease, i care about how it feels. Arkham’s combat was fun, but the insane distances you could instantly travel made it feel like the game was playing itself. mordor’s solution is better imo. but it obviously comes down to personal preference.

            • @[email protected]
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              110 months ago

              I felt it was more about the “free flow” in the free flow combat system in Arkham. You want it to all chain together, and Arkham made sure you only hit the buttons you needed to exactly as many times as you needed to. Mordor let you keep your combo going even though it had been like 10 seconds since the last time you did anything, which wasn’t exactly flowing at that point. That combo system was a great fit for Batman, and it would fit in nicely with Jason Bourne or John Wick as well, and I’m not sure Lord of the Rings was the best fit for it, but it doesn’t seem like many are trying to do that combat style anymore.

  • Makr Alland
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    1410 months ago

    Spacewar! was a F2P PvP game with no microtransactions and no battle pass. Although it’s hard to quantify exact player numbers (it precedes Steam charts), for a while it was the most played videogame in the world.

    Its real-time graphics and multiplayer combat were very influential, and widely copied by many other games.

    • @[email protected]
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      10 months ago

      for a while it was the most played videogame in the world.

      I see what you did there!

      Space War history

      SpaceWar is the first game to be frequently ported to different computers, back when computers took up a big portion of the room they sat it, and when “porting” was practically re-coding, from scratch, in Assembler.

    • Sneezycat
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      10 months ago

      It also popularized the “mechanic” of online matchmaking through steam for pirated and abandoned games. Thank you Spacewar, very cool.

      Edit: the Steam one is a test game for their steamworks system with source code from the original game. The more you know.

      • @[email protected]
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        210 months ago

        Wow this brought it full circle, the name looked familiar but then it clicked, back in my pirating days lol

  • @[email protected]
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    910 months ago

    Battlefield 1942 introduced rideable vehicles to the maps.

    Halo introduced regenerating health.

  • @[email protected]
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    1010 months ago

    People always forget that resident evil 4(? There is a million of them) made third person shooters mainstream.

    • @[email protected]
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      1010 months ago

      What are you smoking? That’s like a 2005 game.

      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-person_shooter

      Jonathan S. Harbour of the University of Advancing Technology argues that Tomb Raider (1996) by Eidos Interactive (now Square Enix Europe) is “largely responsible for the popularity of this genre”.

      Hell, Max Payne was definitely more popular, and it came out in 2001.

    • yeehaw
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      1010 months ago

      More than half seems bold, otherwise I agree

      • @[email protected]
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        10 months ago

        It sure feels like more than half of them label themselves as some blend of metroidvania, as long as it isnt a cardbattler or a roguelike, its 100% going to label itself a metroidvania.

        • yeehaw
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          210 months ago

          I guess I just look at it as you’re saying FPS, MMO, RPG, RTS, etc are less than half.

  • @[email protected]
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    10 months ago

    Iirc (edit - apparently incorrect) Halo was the first to use left joystick as forward/backward and left/right strafe; and right joystick as look up/down and pivot left/right.

    I even recall articles counting it as a point against the game due to its ‘awkward controls’ …but apparently after a tiny learning curve, the entire community/industry got on board.

    • @[email protected]
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      10 months ago

      I thought goldeneye had that basic controls concept a few years before. and Turok was pretty close before that.

      edit: ah forgot n64 only had one joystick. but basically the same with the left d-pad and middle joystick.

      • @[email protected]
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        210 months ago

        If not GoldenEye, then I believe Perfect Dark would let you plug in two controllers for a dual analog control scheme.

      • @[email protected]
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        910 months ago

        I think you are right, but the N64 controls used the C buttons as analog inputs for camera movement.

        • Chozo
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          910 months ago

          If we’re talking Goldeneye, I believe the C-button aiming was an alternate control scheme. IIRC, the default controls had the stick control both your forward/backward motion, but also your left/right turning, instead of left/right strafing, so your aim was controlled horizontally by the stick, but vertically was pretty much locked on the horizon at all times. To do fine-tuned aiming, or to aim vertically at all, required holding R to bring up the crosshairs which you could then move with the stick, while standing still.

          In hindsight, it’s amazing that we ever tolerated that.

          • @[email protected]
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            210 months ago

            You’re correct. In addition you could strafe using left/right C buttons, and you could look up/down using up/down C buttons, but that was awkward and not really designed to aim.

            But we also must remember that those games had an auto lock system. Your character would actually target the ennemies by himself, you would only use the crosshair to dona headshot when you have time to aim, or to aim at a specific object in the game.

            But yeah, that seems so clunky compared to what we have today

          • AsakuraMao
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            510 months ago

            One of my friends still owns an N64 and wants to play Goldeneye and Perfect Dark sometimes. This control scheme raises my blood pressure so much lol.

          • @[email protected]
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            310 months ago

            Tank controls.

            Metroid Prime used them too, and it worked fine. The game was designed around it, so enemies were either already on your level, or were slow enough to react that you could stop and aim.

            The remake has other control schemes, but I don’t use them because I like the one the game was made for.

          • @[email protected]
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            210 months ago

            Tbf it was always gonna be hard to make good fps controls on the N64 controller. The movement itself was fine once you got used to it (including strafing etc), but the real sticking point as you mentioned is the shoulder button aiming. It pretty much forced you to stop dead to aim accurately. So you really had to pick your time to hold position and take a few shots before running again.

            I still had a lot of fun with it despite knowing there were better options out there with mouse and keyboard (although come to think of it when I was first playing wolfenstein and Doom I think I played with keyboard only back then).

      • @[email protected]
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        210 months ago

        Goldeneye got it functional, but it was janky. Try playing 4p with the old N64 controllers and you’d sorta struggle to move and aim.

        Halo updated the standard with something usable in modern games. I think a few games in that genre also set the expectation that weapons should have no aim penalty while strafing, since console players would use small strafing motions to do light aim correction.

      • @[email protected]
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        210 months ago

        Goldeneye scheme was forward and back on the joystick moved forward and back but left and right on the stick turned the camera in that direction. The opposite movements were on the c buttons (strafe left and right and look up and down).

        It was incredibly disorientating going from that to Turok which used the strafe on the c buttons and looking on the stick. It’s the same feeling I now get when I try to go back to Goldeneye now that the other orientation has been made universal.

        On a side note, the goldeneye controls allowed for a unique way of moving around the map with circle strafing that you can’t really replicate in other games.

    • mememuseum
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      10 months ago

      The original Medal of Honor for the Playstation 1 had an alternate control scheme that let you move in the modern dual stick manner.

  • @[email protected]
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    410 months ago

    I wonder what the source of the RTS conventions was. Ctrl num for making groups. Double press to centre on group. X for scattering units. A to stop them. Pretty sure these predate C&C but the only one before that I can think of is dune.

    • @[email protected]
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      110 months ago

      Maybe because that one didn’t come from videogames. Selection sets or groups have been a thing on UI for a long time, ever since vertex editor on CAD software.

  • @[email protected]
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    610 months ago

    I’m surprised I haven’t seen anyone say Pokemon. From a. monster collecting/battle game nothing has really came close.

  • @[email protected]
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    2310 months ago

    For first person shooters (mix of first introduced and popularised):

    Doom: started and popularised the genre. Also started and popularised rasterized 3d graphics for gaming (though the game itself was still 2d). Also first fps multiplayer and modding

    Quake: various game modes (Deathmatch, capture the flag), as well as being the first true 3d fps. Popularised multiplayer and modding.

    Team fortress (quake mod): Different specialist characters.

    Goldeneye 64: popularized multilayer console fps, taught character size can be a significant advantage/disadvantage, depending on if you got Oddjob or Jaws.

    Half-life: started horror fps genre, (mostly) seemless world

    CS: customizable loadouts instead of search for guns each time you spawn, more game modes

    UT: AI bots

    Perfect dark: secondary fire for weapons

    Deus ex: rpg fps

    Halo: finally figured out a decent controller control scheme (one stick looks, one moves, button for grenades rather than needing to select grenade from list of guns). First fps I remember vehicles in, too.

    Battlefield: large scale multiplayer

    Socom: fps game that isn’t first person, online console multiplayer

    Call of duty: using gun sights to aim

    Far cry: open world fps

    Doom 3: used lighting (or lack thereof) to bring fps horror to a new level.

    Crisis: famous for pushing hardware and people caring more about the benchmark results than the game itself (I tried the second one, it was ok but I didn’t really get into it)

    Call of duty: zombies (and other alternate game modes), kill steaks, online progression (unlocking guns and attachments as you level, prestige levels)

    HL2/portal: brought physics and its involvement in fps games to a new level

    TF2: f2p, microtransactions (though not predatory or p2w so the game isn’t remembered for this)

    Borderlands: loot-based fps rpg

    Metro 2033: fps survival

    Halo reach: custom maps

    Destiny: MMORPG FPS

    Overwatch: hero-based, and hero roles (dps, tank, healer)

    Pub bg: battle Royale

  • @[email protected]
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    510 months ago

    I feel like Call of Duty 4 modernized and standardized the FPS genre on at least consoles. Every call of duty game still looks and feels exactly the same since CoD4 and every other first person shooter copied it’s control scheme because it was so firmly cemented.

      • @[email protected]
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        210 months ago

        Real world weapon customization comes to mind. Other than that I don’t know, I haven’t played Halo 3.