What games popularized certain mechanics?

Submitted ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨ApollosArrow@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨games@lemmy.world⁩

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.

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kratoz29@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Please people, help me out with this, which game popularized any modern game to be a huge ass open world action RPG?

My best bet is that it is The Witcher 3’s fault.

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- XTL@sopuli.xyz ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_(video_game)
  
  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_(video_game)
  
  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angband_(video_game)
  
  Depends on how you constrain that idea. Open worlds were a very early idea, but old computers were somewhat capacity limited in how much content you could have.
  
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  - r00ty@kbin.life ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I would say older than that (well maybe not elite), as much as the tech could handle it you should include:
    
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Esprit
    
    Here you had several town maps, including dual carriageways, main roads, side roads, one way streets. And you could just drive down any of them. They were all nondescript, but the amount of memory really limited what could be done.
    
    There was also the games using the freescape engine. Driller, Darkside and Total Eclipse. These were all about as open world as you could achieve on the hardware of the time.
    
    In terms of "open world" the definition is open to interpretation. I'd argue that text based adventures were open world too in their own way. So it really depends on what features people agree makes an "open world" game as to what the first game that contains all those features was.
    
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- MalReynolds@slrpnk.net ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Been around since at least early Final Fantasy / Chrono Trigger SNES era (for some values of action)
  
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  - Buddahriffic@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Could even say it goes back to the Zelda games on NES. Metroidvania games might also count. Those games all have the “you might progress in any available direction” mechanic, which IMO is the core of the open world mechanic.
    
    There’s also some games like Star tropics where the whole world was open (as in you could return to previous locations) but progress was more linear.
    
    Would super Mario world count as open world? Not as old as the NES ones I mentioned, but I’m curious. Or say if you could go back to previous worlds in SMB3, would that be open world?
    
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- tfw_no_toiletpaper@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Probably any Bethesda game
  
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- Cornelius_Wangenheim@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  GTA3 is the one that started the trend.
  
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  - kratoz29@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Hmm, it lacked the RPG part though… GTA San Andreas on the other hand 😀
    
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- Nibodhika@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Open world RPGs were always the goal, old games tried to mask the hardware limitations by using several techniques. By the time the Witcher 3 came along open world RPGs were the most common thing, in fact at the time lots of people called the Witcher a sellout because of that, it’s like if it had come up a couple years ago and had base buildiechanics, EVERYONE else was doing it.
  
  There are LOTS of examples that pre-date TW3, I’ll limit myself to a few, just because it’s the ones I played. In the 90s and early 2000s I used to play Ultima Online, which is an MMO from 97 that has a vast open world. But if you want first person, Oblivion is old enough to drink.
  
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- UndercoverUlrikHD@programming.dev ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  It started long before that, I think ubisoft in general was hugely influential in that trend.
  
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- ICastFist@programming.dev ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  In a way, I’d say World of Warcraft (2004 onwards) popularized that.
  
  Here’s your starting place. Here’s a bunch of easy quests and monsters.
  
  You quit the starting area. Everything feels huge and really, really fucking far away. One step in the wrong direction and you’re assaulted by an enemy with a 💀 for a level. Not only that, most people would only see the loading screen once before doing an hours-long playthrough and that also increased the sense of “fucking huge world”
  
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- djsoren19@yiffit.net ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I think the fault lies with Ubisoft and Assassin’s Creed. They really championed the idea of a bloated open world stuffed with systems that don’t really interact with each other, and now AAA gaming just keeps trying to stuff more mechanics in the pile.
  
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- PunchingWood@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  First thing that came to mind are the Dragon Age games before, at least Inquisition was sort of action RPG.
  
  Before that in a lesser extent the Assassin’s Creed games, although they were more action than RPG.
  
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- iegod@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Outcast
  
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Cypher@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Elite was the first game to utilize procedural generation, which has been extremely popular across multiple genres.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_(video_game)

guinnessworldrecords.com/…/first-use-of-procedura…

While some might not consider it a game mechanic I certainly do, as gaming the proceduraly created levels is a core part of certain games, see mapping tactics in Diablo 2 for example as you use knowledge of procedural generation to reduce the time to find and kill bosses.

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- johannesvanderwhales@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Rogue and Hack both predate elite.
  
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  - Cypher@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    See I thought of Rogue first but trusted the Guiness book of world records! I guess they need to be corrected
    
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BigLgame@lemy.lol ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
People always forget that resident evil 4(? There is a million of them) made third person shooters mainstream.

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- Dasus@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  What are you smoking? That’s like a 2005 game.
  
  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.
  
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  - BigLgame@lemy.lol ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Well you are right but I’m talking about the style and feel that one of those earlier pivot resident evils created. It plays the same as gears of war and all other cover shooters that followed. Sure third person existed but everything today plays in a way that series established.
    
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- pyre@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  not 3rd person shooters, but over the shoulder camera.
  
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  - BigLgame@lemy.lol ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Yeah that’s a better way to put it, everything that followed took that same path
    
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PalmTreeIsBestTree@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Crush the Castle inspired Angry Birds and several other games with the same catapult mechanic. Loved that flash game way before Angry Birds was put on the App Store.

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acosmichippo@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
funny how no one mentioned World of Warcraft for MMOs because it’s too obvious.

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- Grangle1@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  There were popular MMOs before WoW, such as Runescape and Everquest. WoW just took a popular genre and rocketed it into the stratusphere.
  
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  - dogslayeggs@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    The question was, “what games popularized certain mechanics.” The question was not, “what games created or introduced certain mechanics.”
    
    Yes, there were other MMOs before WoW, but WoW took MMOs to a completely new level of popularity. I didn’t play ANY MMOs before WoW and wasn’t really interested to, but it was so popular that I jumped on to see what the deal was. Since then I have played ESO, LOTRO, AOC, and one other whose name I forget.
    
    Other MMOs were popular among gaming nerds before WoW, but WoW made MMOs popular to normal people.
    
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  - bitjunkie@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I tried UO, AC, EQ1+2 and can say that WoW’s beloved IP, look and feel, and relative lack of clunkiness in the controls and animations were big differentiators for me.
    
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- djsoren19@yiffit.net ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  because it’s flat out wrong. WoW aped most of its systems from Everquest, which most of WoW’s development team was actively playing. They made some improvements on the genre, but the bones existed as early as 1997 with Ultima Online.
  
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  - sushibowl@feddit.nl ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    WoW was like the iPhone of MMOs. Didn’t invent anything, just put it all together in a coherent, accessible, user friendly package.
    
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  - acosmichippo@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    the question was “popularized” not “invented”.
    
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sirico@feddit.uk ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Arma 2-3 have been responsible for at least 3 major multiplayer genres.

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- Danitos@reddthat.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  SovietWomble has a video essay that touches this topic.
  
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rimjob_rainer@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Ocarina of Time is the mother of modern 3D gaming with Z-targeting.

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RoccosBasilisk@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Battlefield 1942 introduced rideable vehicles to the maps.

Halo introduced regenerating health.

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- Duamerthrax@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  If you’re counting the shields, Bungie’s Oni did it first.
  
  Halo also had vehicles in 2001. Bf1942 came out in 2002. Other FPS games have had vehicles before that, but they were always clunky. Hell, there’s a vehicle section in Shadow Warrior(1997).
  
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xanu@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I’m not 100% sure if factorio was the first, but the devs at Wube certainly perfected the idea and now there’s a whole market for the “factory game” genre.

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- frezik@midwest.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Even if it’s not the first, I’d say it’s the first that figured out that computers were powerful enough that you can have a gobsmackingly huge factory.
  
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rustyfish@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Don’t know if this counts, but Resident Evil 4 killed off the tank controls and single-handedly popularised third person cameras for survival horror games.

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- ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Resident Evil 4 still had tank controls, but it moved the camera behind the back. Unlike dual analog third person shooters at the time, it did have one major innovation: it moved the character to the left side of the screen so you could more easily see what’s in front of you.
  
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- catloaf@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I think Halo was what popularized the twin stick controls.
  
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- djsoren19@yiffit.net ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Not even just survival horror, RE4 was a landmark title just as a third-person action shooter. It had a huge influence on the generation of third person shooters that came after it.
  
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dumblederp@aussie.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
WASD + mouse aim in FPS. Wolf3d, Doom1 and Blakestone used the arrow keys, spacebar and Ctrl back in the day. The arrows were turn, not strafe too.

I reckon it was some friends of mine in the 90s in Box Hill, Melbourne, Victoria who were the first to use WASD/mouse aim. Share house above a shop at the end of a tram line.

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- huginn@feddit.it ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Quake 1 popularized mouselook
  
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RightHandOfIkaros@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Metroid, which spawned more than half of all indie games.

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- cyberpunk007@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  More than half seems bold, otherwise I agree
  
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  - RightHandOfIkaros@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨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 iteslf a metroidvania.
    
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Duamerthrax@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Serious Sam The First Encounter claims to have invented event cued music. Ie, intense fight music stops once an encounter is over.

Quake is believed by many to have invented Rocket Jumping, but Marathon (1993) had two forms of it first.

Marathon and Rise of the Triad both released with duel welding pistols in the same week.

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- frezik@midwest.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I dispute the Serious Sam claim. The LucasArts iMUSE system was doing things like that years before.
  
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  - Duamerthrax@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I might be miss remembering the claim. It was from a documentary, so I might be able to find to when I get home.
    
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- chanibal@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  And ROTT also had rocket jumps.
  
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noughtnaut@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Dune II - basically the grandfather of every RTS game or there. Teams, resource collection, tech tree, fog of war, et cetera. Or preussiske it was (not World of) War raft, it’s been too long and memory gets fuzzy.

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- NostraDavid@programming.dev ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Dune I and II were in development in parallel. One of them was cancelled (don’t remember which one), but they forgot to tell the company, IIRC.
  
  preussiske
  
  ???
  
  Warcraft 1 came after Dune (and Blizzard were big fans, IIRC), either way. It enabled multi-selection (based on spreadsheet programs, IIRC).
  
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  - noughtnaut@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Sorry about the surprise prussians. I was never any good at typing on glass, I much prefer an actual keyboard.
    
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bruhsoulz@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Doom or Wolfenstein birthed 3d fps I’m p sure 😁

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- frezik@midwest.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I’d put it at Quake.
  
  Wolf3d is an evolution of Hovertank 3D, which had flat shading for walls, floors, and ceilings. Wolf3d then has textured walls but still flat shading on the floors and ceilings. Some other games came out after Wolf3d that had textures floors and ceilings while id worked on Doom.
  
  Doom not only had textured everything, but also stairs. Trick was, you couldn’t develop a level that had a hallway going over another hallway. Not enough computer horsepower yet to pull that off. This is sometimes called “2.5D”.
  
  Quake brings everything together. Everything’s texture mapped, your levels have true height with things built over other things, and the character models are even fully 3d rendered.
  
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somnuz@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
This is a fantastic timeline if you want to go into details.

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- ApollosArrow@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I was hoping an article existed!
  
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Anticorp@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Warcraft started an entire genre of games. Blizzard took that concept and created StarCraft, which spawned million dollar tournaments.

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- Pea666@feddit.nl ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  You mean RTS games? Warcraft is from ‘94, two years after Dune 2 was released.
  
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  - rimjob_rainer@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I think he means Mobas or Tower Defense games
    
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- RootBeerGuy@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Yeah, however before Warcraft there was Dune II. But I am not sure which one was more popular at the time and I think Dune II came way before Warcraft.
  
  I think why Dune II is more notable though is that the first Dune game was more of an adventure style came, not a strategy game. Then they changed the game with its successor and introduced the asymmetrical factions that each had a few unique units with differing strategies.
  
  Warcraft took that concept further of course. But even there its rather Warcraft II that really had a big breakthrough.
  
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cyberpunk007@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Souls games. Popularized invasions.

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- rustydrd@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Perfect example that “popularized” is different from “popular”.
  
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DerArzt@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Rouge rougelike

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corvett@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Note: read “first” as “first popular/important”, not just for this thread but for most conversations across media like this.

Spelunky was the first “Roguelite” that brought permadeath with meta progression to another genre, starting the modern wave of Roguelites.

Pokemon kicked off “monster collection” as a mechanic

To my knowledge, Halo was the first major game to do regenerating health

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drphungky@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
DOTA popularized and also invented the battle pass mechanic.

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OttoVonNoob@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I’m surprised I haven’t seen anyone say Pokemon. From a. monster collecting/battle game nothing has really came close.

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Lemminary@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
The Sims for the scrub-the-toilet mechanic.

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resetbypeer@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Dune 2 for it popularized RTS genre. C&c to bring it to the masses

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abbadon420@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Why hasn’t anybody named Worl of Warcraft? They definitely made a shift in the mmorpg scene…

Or Tomb Raider for the first big budget movie adaptation.

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Summzashi@lemmy.one ⁨3⁩ ⁨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.

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simple@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Dark Souls popularized the stamina meter and the “dropping all your money on death and having to go pick it back up” mechanic. Not to mention spawning a subgenre of similar games like Lies of P and Lords of the Fallen

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somnuz@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
This might be a little on the side of the main topic but there was always something cool about Crash Bandicoot 100 Apples > 1 Life, and you could grind more to make some levels more forgiving, like semi-adjustable difficulty level based on your previous approach… And later on — warp zones, you get to choose from a few options so the progression has variation.

Another thing that comes to mind, not sure if a first game to do it, THPS for unlocking movies and later cheat codes, modes and characters for finishing the career. Plus the whole gap marathon for Private Carrera.

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Tudsamfa@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨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. .

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plumbercraic@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨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.

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