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.
yeah it was such an improvement so instantly adopted that people forget 3rd person shooters used to put your character right in the middle before that.
i don’t think they were as influential no. overwatch loot boxes were not only a monetization venue but also the main leveling system. whether you paid or not you always played toward a loot box. and couple with the game’s massive success and popularity it opened the floodgates to this form of monetization to be a standard.
Prince of Persia: realistic animations with weight. also popularized a platformer subgenre, which was called cinematic platformer but unfortunately the life of the subgenre was cut short due to the advent of 3d.
Diablo: ARPG genre, and even more so loot rarity system (especially the four tiers common/rare/epic/legendary) and affixes in loot as well.
Half-Life: a lot of good things, sure, as pointed out by other comments, but I will also never forgive valve for popularizing the game not fucking starting for ages.
Rogue and maybe more so Nethack: roguelike mechanics.
some really obvious ones are Tetris: falling block puzzles and Sokoban: pushing block puzzles.
also now pretty much obsolete but Overwatch: loot boxes. they existed before, but Overwatch made them an industry standard.
yeah HL definitely was the one popularized it as default. quake players changed the bindings for it; i know because i played that game with old-school doom/duke controls
if you believe company pr people, sure why not. mick had receipts. and I’ll believe a talking ferret before i give any company pr person any credence. they lie for a living.
one of my favorite games of all time: Prince of Persia 1989 (1990 on PC). it’s a “cinematic platformer” where the animations take priority over responsiveness.
once you get the hang of it, it’s incredible what Jordan Mechner could fit into a ~1MB game controlled with just 5 keys. the realistic platforming and sword fights were unlike anything I’d seen. still impresses me to this day.
it’s kind of notorious for being a hard game you have to finish in an hour, but I think it’s a must play. I always felt like it was one of those zero-fat games. no filler, no repetition without a curveball thrown in every now and then.
flashback and blackthorne were two more in the genre that i really really enjoyed before 3d games came along and ruined the momentum of the genre. other people will suggest another world (aka out of this world) but that one, while iconic and unique, will feel more antiquated by today’s standards and works more like a puzzle than the rest.