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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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
I don’t know what game first came up with it, but Super Mario RPG was the first time I saw timed hits for attack and defense in a JRPG. While the mechanic isn’t exactly ubiquitous it has popped up in a handful of other games over the years and it always reminds me of that game.
This was definitely the first time I also remember this appearing, and it made it more engaging for me as a child.
For first person shooters (mix of first introduced and popularised):
Doom: started and popularised the genre. Also started and popularised rasterized 3d graphics for gaming (though the game itself was still 2d). Also first fps multiplayer and modding
Quake: various game modes (Deathmatch, capture the flag), as well as being the first true 3d fps. Popularised multiplayer and modding.
Team fortress (quake mod): Different specialist characters.
Goldeneye 64: popularized multilayer console fps, taught character size can be a significant advantage/disadvantage, depending on if you got Oddjob or Jaws.
Half-life: started horror fps genre, (mostly) seemless world
CS: customizable loadouts instead of search for guns each time you spawn, more game modes
UT: AI bots
Perfect dark: secondary fire for weapons
Deus ex: rpg fps
Halo: finally figured out a decent controller control scheme (one stick looks, one moves, button for grenades rather than needing to select grenade from list of guns). First fps I remember vehicles in, too.
Battlefield: large scale multiplayer
Socom: fps game that isn’t first person, online console multiplayer
Call of duty: using gun sights to aim
Far cry: open world fps
Doom 3: used lighting (or lack thereof) to bring fps horror to a new level.
Crisis: famous for pushing hardware and people caring more about the benchmark results than the game itself (I tried the second one, it was ok but I didn’t really get into it)
Call of duty: zombies (and other alternate game modes), kill steaks, online progression (unlocking guns and attachments as you level, prestige levels)
HL2/portal: brought physics and its involvement in fps games to a new level
TF2: f2p, microtransactions (though not predatory or p2w so the game isn’t remembered for this)
Borderlands: loot-based fps rpg
Metro 2033: fps survival
Halo reach: custom maps
Destiny: MMORPG FPS
Overwatch: hero-based, and hero roles (dps, tank, healer)
Pub bg: battle Royale
i disagree with a lot of this
Alien Resurrection on PSX was the first game to use the dual-stick control scheme. Halo came out more than a year later.
Funnily, it was reviewed poorly at the time:
Game journos have always been a joke.
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.
Rouge rougelike
*rogue Roguelike
Though rougelike certainly sounds like an interesting genre too 😉
How about the flowing hair on Lara Croft in Tomb Raider 2 and later?
From my understanding, they wanted to have that working for TR1 but missed the deadline, so Lara got a static hair bun in TR1.
Ocarina of time, 3d, lock on, one enemy attacks at a time. So much of modern gaming pulled from ocarina of time
Love oot, but the only thing it brought 3d too was the Zelda series. For lock on Mario 64 had it, not sure if anything else did before then.
Oh wow, did Zelda really make this popular? I wouldn’t have guessed. I’ve play it a ton.
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.’
Minecraft for the fully breakable/buildable procedural open world.
Minecraft is far more responsible for the survival crafting genre that followed in its wake.
Minecraft Hunger Games, although a mod, is responsible for the Battle Royal hype aswell.
So Minecraft caused Fortnite twice - once as a survival crafting and building game and then as a Battle Royal retaining some of these elements
Pretty sure the actual hunger games movie had more to do with that
As the inspiration yes. But Minecraft hunger games was the first to do it in gaming while also reaching maybe not more people than the movies, but definitly spreading to communities that the movies and books didnt reach (e.g. i didnt watch the movies until well over ten years after I had played my first game of MC hunger games)
I miss MC Hunger Games servers. Are any still around?
Also Mindcrack UHC, not sure if that came before the hunger games mods tho
What’s the timeline on that mod versus the Battle Royale mod for DayZ? Because as far as I could tell, the DayZ mod is the true progenitor, but DayZ was itself inspired by Minecraft.
I couldnt find a release history for the Minecraft mod, however according to the following article, it was released about a year before the original PlayerUnknown mod for DayZ / Arma 3.
Warning: Cant decline cookies (at least in EU)
https://www.eurogamer.net/before-fortnite-and-pubg-there-was-minecraft-survival-games
It was more a server side plugin than a mod, but that only grew its popularity.
Even randomised loot existed around the map
Skyrim for the horse armor dlc.
That was Oblivion believe it or not. Ahh, the good ol’ days where everyone got up in arms over even cosmetic DLC.
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.
Lol you’re correct it did increase the health pool, but what I remembered most was the cosmetic aspect, I was young tho
My mistake you’re totally right there!
I remember them having a sale on Oblivion DLC one time where the rest of the DLC was half-off, but the horse armor was double.
Oblivion was weird on DLC. Knights of the Nine was pretty good, and Shivering Isles was amazing. But they also had bullshit stuff like Horse Armour.
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.
Renegade was some of the most fun I ever had in a shooter. Truly a unique experience
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.
Was it the first to allow you to look on the map to choose where you respawn, specifically on teammates?
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.
Battlefield 2142 had that, don’t know it that was the first one to do that though. Might’ve been BF2.
I can confirm that you could pick spawn points in BF2 and BF2142.
I remember an old BF1942 mod that had spawn selection; I don’t know exactly how far back the feature went, but it was around for a while before BF2.
desert combat? that was the shits
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.
Battlefield 2 intruduced that one.
Minecraft singlehandedly created a genre called “Survival”.
I think most of the games around 2005’s Indie Game Boom created lots of brilliant mechanics that’s been copied still.
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.
Pacman was the first to simulate a real life mechanic, of munching pills, listening to repetitive music, and running from multicoloured ghosts.
dark souls
Rogue for the rogue mechanic. Progressing in a game as far as you can until you die, then using some form of enhancement mechanic be harder faster better or stronger to go again.
Isn’t it called “rogue-like” because that last part of metaprogress was not in rogue? Maybe I’m confusing it with roguelite.
Be careful; you’re stepping into a holy war. There are some who stick to “the Berlin Interpretation”, where there are far more criteria to what makes a roguelike, and from my perspective, it makes those games so close to Rogue that it’s not worth giving it its own genre, plus this classification came out just before Spelunky ruined it. Colloquially, you’re typically right though. Most will call a game roguelite if your progress gives you upgrades that make the next runs easier, whereas a roguelike may still have unlocks that add more variety or “sidegrades” that are neither better nor worse.
Inter-run progression was not in Rogue and is a modern concept. And arguably anti-roguelike
I’m curious if it’s actually a different one. That’s the biblical “source” but I feel like there was a long gap before the indie scene picked up that theme in droves. I’m now unsure what it was that started that more modern trend.
Rogue was the originator, but NetHack and ADOM did more to popularize Roguelikes than Rogue itself ever managed. NetHack was the first one I ever heard of, and it’s the only reason I know Rogue existed in the first place.
Funny enough, Rogue doesn’t have a set of permanent enhancement for a wider meta game. In Rogue you start over from scratch always and every time. That’s the difference between a roguelike and a rogue liTe game. Binding of Isaac and Spelunky are roguelike. You die, you start over from scratch. Hades and Slay the spyre are rogue lite. Every run gives permanent enhancements that change the next runs, so each time you start slightly different or progressively better.
Hades, yes. That’s a premier Roguelite with meaningful meta progression.
Slay the Spire is fuzzy on that point. I would not recommend it to someone looking for a Roguelite. It straddles the line in that it has very limited meta progression which is quickly exhausted and basically works as a tutorial. Once you’ve maxed out the card unlocks for each character it plays with the same feel as a Roguelike game. It’s still not a pure a Roguelike since the starting boon choice and the card swap event allow some minor meta-influence between runs, but there’s no more meta-progression.
I often describe slay the spire’s meta progression as “a roguelike with homework”.
Thank you. That’s a flawless description.
Metroid, which spawned more than half of all indie games.
More than half seems bold, otherwise I agree
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.
I guess I just look at it as you’re saying FPS, MMO, RPG, RTS, etc are less than half.
