And changing yourself. Frequent magic users would get old and spindly, I believe occasionally glowing. Axe swingers would get ripped. Your character would be a literal representation of your playstyle and that was cool as hell.
It was both more and less involved than that. Putting XP into the Strength stats made your character buff, Skill stats made them tall, and Will stats gave you glowing patterns on your body, except in 3 where they made your tattoos glow instead. What you actually did was irrelevant, just how you spent your XP. In Fable 1, buying levels also made your character older, but age became connected to plot in 2 and was dropped as a morph in 3. Moral alignment in all three and ethical alignment in 2 and 3 also affected character appearance, but the specifics varied a lot between games.
My problem with the Forerunner stuff in Halo 4 is the same problem I have with all the aesthetic changes in 4 and 5 - it’s extremely busy. 1, 2, and 3 have a sleek and simple design language that makes it very easy to tell what’s happening in chaotic combat. The vibrant colors and shiny materials even give Halo 3 an almost heroic fantasy vibe. They deliberately went the other direction with Reach to enhance the grim tone of the game, but environments are still relatively simple so that enemies stand out. 4 and 5 put excessive lines and greeblies on absolutely everything. It’s all so packed with details that you sometimes lose enemies in the background and it can be difficult to tell what you’re looking at.
I’ve also seen volume settings not kick in until you loaded a save file. Also, PS1 era Final Fantasy games that don’t acknowledge your button mappings until the save has been loaded, so that B is select and A is cancel on the main menu, but the other way in-game.
RPGs are absolutely terrible about giving you the ability to inflict status effects on enemies, but not giving random encounter enemies enough HP to justify inflicting statuses, and then also making the bosses immune to them.
And I’m hoping for them to be flatpacks so they still run five years later. I’ve had to resort to running Windows builds via Proton for games that have native Linux builds because they don’t work anymore.