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. .
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.
Only games I ever 100%ed were…Assassins Creed 1 and Rocket League, strictly by achievements only. Like I never made it past Champ in RL, and AC1 was really just beat game and collect flags. I never have the urge to 100% a game cause usually it’s just a grind for grinds sake and that isn’t fun to me
Thanks! I spent years in Diamond, and had a mini goal to get to Champ. Never really been one to practice mechanics, it was just sheer rotation and positioning. Like I can’t hit off the wall with any kind of consistency. Hit it in like…2019 and haven’t played much since, I actually played last night prior to this comment for the first time in probably a year.
I picked Satisfactory back up because I keep getting part way in and losing focus. Just unlocked tiers 5 and 6! In the process of setting up hypertubes to my major locations.
Maybe a bad time to pick up the game again, since 1.0 is releasing next month, along with the story/campaign, so you might just get to do it all over again!
Yeah I’m about to the spot where I normally get stuck right now. So I probably won’t make much progress in that amount of time anyway. I guess we’ll see!
I think Spyro was the first mainstream game to standardise achievements, you could do random stuff in-game and it gave you a little pop up, carried over to Ratchet and Clank and now every game has official achievements
Not the first one on the PSX, that’s for sure. Also, getting some extra stuff for 100% a game wasn’t new by the time of Spyro, both Donkey Kong Country and Crash Bandicoot already did that
This. They were indeed called Skill Points, and Insomniac loved to tie cheats and bonus material to completing them. I played the shit out of Spyro and Ratchet and Clank back in the day.
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.
Yeah, you’re right to highlight warcraft although I don’t think it’s a clean line with Warcraft between dune 2 and c&c. C&C was probably around 2 years into development by the time Warcraft came out, and my assumption is most of the actual game design was pretty finalised by that point. Though I’m sure some minor influences made their way in, I don’t think Warcraft massively affected the kind of game we got in the end.
But yeah that’s not to diminish the contribution of warcraft to the genre, there’s loads of games that followed copying the Warcraft style of RTS, even as part of the c&c series in the end with Generals.
Towards the end of the decade Total Annihilation would be released and it’s modern day fan made remake, Beyond All Reason, is really good. Sad there’s no campaign though, I really loved the TA campaign
gonna be real, WC1 was not a huge title at the time. I think a lot of people look back, rightly, at WC3 being one of the greatest RTS of all time and then think the whole series was lauded at release, but Warcraft: Orcs and Humans was just okay.
Kinda wild to see nobody mention System Shock, the game that invented audio logs. It may seem quaint in retrospect, but at the time all shooters were in the vein of Doom, and story in a shooter was considered “like story in porn.” System Shock was not only the first to communicate the plot and next steps to the player through found audio logs, but it also filled the player in on side stories and provided characterization to the survivors on Citadel station.
The game recently got a remaster, and despite very few gameplay changes, still holds up really well in 2024. You can really see the bones of later games in it, such as story focused shooters like Bioshock or F.E.A.R. and I’d really recommend it to anyone interested in playing a great retro game.
They also said popularized, though. System Shock never really got beyond cult classic status, so while it invented them, I’d say BioShock popularized them.
Single-handedly? Nah. It pulled a lot of existing ideas together though, and it’s certainly responsible for the popularity. Another Minecraft influence is early-access.
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.
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.
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
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.
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).
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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”
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.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne