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.
Blasphemous, a 2D Metroidvania game with a very distinctive art style.
So far loving the world design and level design, it reminds me strongly of Dark Souls, without feeling like a clone in any way. I do unfortunately suck at platforming, and this game is so far not forgiving about it…
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.
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.
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.
And also the concept of your collection of souls being recoverable from your last point of death.
I know the “death bag” mechanic had been done before, but the disappearing cache is a core element of Soulslike gameplay that has been repeated so many times since then. It adds a sense of urgency and FOMO to the recovery of your stuff. If you die again, it’s gone for good.
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.
Battlefield 1942 always stands out to me as the one that popularized large scale online battles on big maps with vehicles. At the time it was revolutionary in online gaming.
Command & Conquer: Renegade came out around the same time as well, with similar features. I kinda wish that game had a sequel as well.
Another gameplay feature that comes to mind is the exclamation/question mark above NPC characters for quests. I remember it first from WarCraft 3, but I think it really kicked off with World of WarCraft to get adopted by many more games.
I don’t remember being possible to spawn on teammates in BF1942, but definitely remember it as a first to select spawn points on map like Battlefield always did.
I can’t remember if that mod had squad spawns. But I definitely remember playing it a lot, that was an absolutely revolutionary mod with so much content, not to distract from other great BF1942 mods though. I believe the original DICE team originated from that mod team to create Battlefield 2 as well.
DICE hired a few of the DC devs to work on BF2, then promptly laid them all off about 6 months or so after release, and then the laid off devs and others who weren’t hired made Kaos Studios, and made Frontlines: Fuel of War and Homefront, before being corporate acquisitioned into non existence.
There were a few BF42 mods that, on certain maps with certain vehicles, allowed you to spawn in vehicles.
IIRC, Forgotten Hope had a number of para-assault maps that allowed players to spawn inside of the aircraft they would parachute out of.
I believe you could also do this in… I can’t remember the name of it, but the Star Wars themed 42 mod (which the BattleFront series either largely copied or was directly inspired by), I think it had some spawn-in-able vehicles as well.
Also BF Vietnam, the official game, used a similar concept of having ‘tunnel exits’ that could be built/placed by Viet Cong engineers, which were placeable spawn points, and the US had the ‘Tango’ … mobile river boat with a helipad thing… which was a mobile spawn point.
I am 99% sure it was BF2 that first introduced being able to spawn on a player, I don’t think any of the mods for the earlier games pulled that off always had to be a vehicle or placeable static object.
I’m not sure I’ve ever had more fun with any game than I did with BF1942. It was just so much fun. There were games with smoother play and deeper mechanics and better graphics, but none were as fun. The dumb mechanics made it amazing, like being able to lie down on the wing of a plane and snipe people while your buddy flew, or dive bombing and parachuting out at 10ft above the ground to capture a point, or shooting the main cannon from a tank into a barracks that has 15 people spawned inside it, or piloting a goddamn aircraft carrier and running it aground to get to a spawn point safely. It was so stupid but so fun.
It is, and I don’t think it’s even the first game to require a subscription fee. It was just so successful at it that everyone wanted that monthly recurring revenue. When it doesn’t work, they’d often rather see the game cease to exist.
Maybe cheating a bit but there are several genres of games that are named after the games that popularized their mechanics such as roguelike/roguelite, souls-like, metroidvania
I know the “hold a button to lock-on to an enemy” was in Mega Man Legends, but in the first game you had to stand still for the lock to work. On MML2, you could lock and run around freely, but that game came after OoT
The fact they used Navi to do the targeting really demonstrates how the devs felt they needed to explain the new mechanic and not just use it ‘because game.’
I thought that the uproar about horse armor was that it was the first pay-to-win DLC. The armor was not just cosmetic but actually provided a stat boost to your horse. The accusation was that the developers had made it too easy for enemies to kill your horse and decided to patch the game to fix it but made players pay for the patch.
It was the beginning of the end, because they saw how much money they made on the horse armour vs how much effort it took to make it. It was actually generally criticized at the time, but it also sold really well.
I’d argue that quake did far more for 3D graphics then it did for FPS. Like Doom is what got FPS into the spotlight even though Wolfenstein 3d came first. Like quake is pretty much what made real 3D possible and doable on the hardware of the time thanks to everything going on under the hood
Absolutely, we didn’t even have any special graphics cards at the time for 3D, I believe? I remember that started some time around Quake 2 but I am not sure, I might remember wrong.
While I don’t know much about video cards, the IBM Monochrome Display Adapter (MDA) is often called the first video card and had a couple of contenders for first that were either designed earlier or released at almost the same time in 1981 and were all for displaying text only. The first GPU card sold to the public was the GeForce 256 in 1999. I’m assuming there’s some in between that were not really used by the public that would have been used in movies and whatnot.
The reason why nobody was selling GPUs before Quake was because quake was THE first 3D game. Doom and other games before Quake were 2.5D and didn’t have 3D models only sprites. Games before Quake essentially mimicked 3D while Quake IS 3D
The term GPU wasn’t used yet. It got applied as something of a marketing term to cards that had hardware transform and lighting, and that was indeed the GeForce 256. Before then, they were “3d accelerators”.
GeForce 256 was marketed as “the world’s first ‘GPU’, or Graphics Processing Unit”, a term Nvidia defined at the time as “a single-chip processor with integrated transform, lighting, triangle setup/clipping, and rendering engines that is capable of processing a minimum of 10 million polygons per second”.
So it kinda depends on perspective. If you take Nvidia’s marketing at face value, then the GeForce 256 was, indeed, the first GPU. You could retroactively apply it to earlier 3d accelerators, including the SNES Super FX chip, but none of them used the term at the time.
At that point, what even is the purpose of defining it? It’s such a specific term that was designed to only apply to their hardware. It’s like creating a new word for a car because you added air conditioning to it.
Sure, they had the first GPU because they coined a term that only applied to one specific product.
The first GPU card sold to the public was the GeForce 256 in 1999.
No it wasn’t. Rendition had the Verite back in 1996 that was true 3D and 2D on the same single video card. At the same time as the Verite was the 3DFX Voodoo (released 1995), but it was 3D only and needed a second card for 2D. Rendition was also the only 3D accelerator natively supported by Quake.
Sony coined the term GPU in 1994 for what was in the Playstation.
Nvidia might have marketed it as the first GPU, but other companies had combined 2D/3D processors on a single chip marketed to consumers well before the GeForce, including Nvidia themselves with the Riva 128. The GeForce was the first product from Nvidia marketed as a GPU, but that doesn’t mean it was the first product to market that was either called a GPU or not called that but still was one. It WAS the first to market with a T&L system (though Rendition had T&L on a chip first it never made it to market).
This is correct. I remember running Quake II in software mode with hardware effects (could that have been OpenGL already?). It ran at like 1 frames per second, because I didn’t have a 3D graphics card. Although the lighting looked lovely when you shot a rocket through a hallway.
And then there was the Quake 2 engine which gave us Deus Ex, American McGee’s Alice and then (through the modified GoldSrc version) Half-Life, Counter Strike and countless others! The family tree of 3D engines is really interesting.
and the Unreal engine which gave us I don’t have any idea how many but just a staggering number. Both solid games on their own, but long-term the engines were the real rock stars
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