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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Slay the Spire spawned a ton of deck builder roguelites.
Without which we wouldn’t have the only true deck builder roguelite, Rogue Light Deck Builder.
https://youtu.be/FC0QczcuFX0?feature=shared
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
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.
Day Z the standalone game was a result of Day Z the mod for Arma 2.
While Day Z (the mod) and Minecraft were in their early phases around the same time (i alpha tested both), I have never heard anyone say that Day Z was inspired by Minecraft, beyond the idea of it being possible for an indie game with a small development team being able to become a huge commercial success.
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
I miss u bukkit ;-;
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)
Also Mindcrack UHC, not sure if that came before the hunger games mods tho
I miss MC Hunger Games servers. Are any still around?
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I’d give that to Tomb Raider but both are exceptional.
Mario 64 figured out applying analog control to 3d platformers which changed the whole genre, though.
If you want to talk about “how do I get up there” in a 3d environment, Doom did it before TR.
It would be a real stretch to classify doom as a platformer.
And it’s a bad one if it applies at all. PC shooters of the time always kinda tried, but it didn’t work. The original Half Life got dinged a few points in original reviews because of a few janky platforming sections.
I don’t think it’s just “being 3D”. Mario 64 put a lot of R&D into particulars of how jumping should work, the camera should work, and what the player’s goals should be. Quite a few games unintentionally copied them, while you could see some games not following their lead early in the 3D days that felt very janky to play. Tomb Raider could arguably be among them with the tank controls, though of course it has its own more niche appeal.
Legend of Zelda OoT followed up with popularizing a targeting button (good ol’ Z-targeting) to focus on one object or enemy in a 3D space and move around it or fight/otherwise interact with it. Such targeting has been a standard feature of 3D action-adventure games ever since.
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SC2 did (or did the first mainstream) implementation of a bunch of things, but I’m surprised it was the first for this.
Idk, I think this game already had a grid base inventory: https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_Schwarze_Auge:_Die_Nordland-Trilogie
April 1992.
Man, that’s some good memories.
Yazinda, Durin, Arva von Harben, Tjalf, Melina and Caldrin, I miss you guys.
Jurassic Park: Trespasser invented physics engines in fps games as we know it. The game itself was a buggy mess and a financial disaster. The player’s health was shown on the main character’s boob for some damn reason. However, they did have the basics of a very good physics engine, and Valve took a lot of their ideas and incorporated it into Half Life 2.
Man, Trespasser is an example of a game with some pretty wild ideas about immersion and puzzle solving in a first person shooter game that the tech just wasn’t quite able to pull off. If anyone is curious there is a positively antique Let’s Play on YouTube that discusses the game’s development, its relation to the wider Jurassic Park franchise, cut content, and, of course, the game in context. I think it may have come from the old Something Awful forums, and it remains, to my mind, the gold standard for what I’d like Let’s Plays to be. Worth checking out if you’ve the time.
funny how no one even mentioned World of Warcraft for MMOs because it’s too obvious.
because it’s flat out wrong. WoW aped most of its systems from Everquest, which most of WoW’s development team was actively playing. They made some improvements on the genre, but the bones existed as early as 1997 with Ultima Online.
the question was “popularized” not “invented”.
I promise you, Everquest was plenty popular at the time, and it didn’t invent those things either.
sure, we can quibble on the threshold of “popular” here. but you can’t question that WOW caused an absolute explosion in MMOs after it. not like anything before.
WoW was like the iPhone of MMOs. Didn’t invent anything, just put it all together in a coherent, accessible, user friendly package.
There were popular MMOs before WoW, such as Runescape and Everquest. WoW just took a popular genre and rocketed it into the stratusphere.
I tried UO, AC, EQ1+2 and can say that WoW’s beloved IP, look and feel, and relative lack of clunkiness in the controls and animations were big differentiators for me.
The question was, “what games popularized certain mechanics.” The question was not, “what games created or introduced certain mechanics.”
Yes, there were other MMOs before WoW, but WoW took MMOs to a completely new level of popularity. I didn’t play ANY MMOs before WoW and wasn’t really interested to, but it was so popular that I jumped on to see what the deal was. Since then I have played ESO, LOTRO, AOC, and one other whose name I forget.
Other MMOs were popular among gaming nerds before WoW, but WoW made MMOs popular to normal people.
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
The first RTS is an obscure Japanese game called Herzog Zwei,
Westwood studios then made Dune 2 and Command & Conquer which basically polished and popularised the genre for the rest of the world.
Pretty much every RTS that followed took at least some inspiration from how those games worked
Warcraft came a year before Command & Conquer and improved on many concepts that Dune II introduced.
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.
Please people, help me out with this, which game popularized any modern game to be a huge ass open world action RPG?
My best bet is that it is The Witcher 3’s fault.
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.
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.
It started long before that, I think ubisoft in general was hugely influential in that trend.
Outcast
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_(video_game)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_(video_game)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angband_(video_game)
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.
I would say older than that (well maybe not elite), as much as the tech could handle it you should include:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Esprit
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.
Probably any Bethesda game
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Hmm, it lacked the RPG part though… GTA San Andreas on the other hand 😀
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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”
First thing that came to mind are the Dragon Age games before, at least Inquisition was sort of action RPG.
Before that in a lesser extent the Assassin’s Creed games, although they were more action than RPG.
That said, I greatly enjoyed all these games, including Witcher 3.
Serious Sam The First Encounter claims to have invented event cued music. Ie, intense fight music stops once an encounter is over.
Quake is believed by many to have invented Rocket Jumping, but Marathon (1993) had two forms of it first.
Marathon and Rise of the Triad both released with duel welding pistols in the same week.
And ROTT also had rocket jumps.
I dispute the Serious Sam claim. The LucasArts iMUSE system was doing things like that years before. Even among fps games, the first Dark Forces game used it.
I might be miss remembering the claim. It was from a documentary, so I might be able to find to when I get home.
It’s also possible they just didn’t know. LucasArts didn’t push the system all that much in their PR. You’ll see it in some bullet points on the retail boxes, and articles of the time might make a passing reference to it. It was quite a remarkable system for the time and they were very low key about it.
Probably just that.
DOTA popularized and also invented the battle pass mechanic.
You mean DotA 2, but DotA (warcraft 3 map) also popularized the MOBA genre. It wasn’t the first MOBA however, as I believe that title belongs to an earlier StarCraft map called Aeon of Strife. But StarCraft didn’t have a robust enough hero system for it to really catch on.
Doom or Wolfenstein birthed 3d fps I’m p sure 😁
I’d put it at Quake.
Wolf3d is an evolution of Hovertank 3D, which had flat shading for walls, floors, and ceilings. Wolf3d then has textured walls but still flat shading on the floors and ceilings. Some other games came out after Wolf3d that had textures floors and ceilings while id worked on Doom.
Doom not only had textured everything, but also stairs. Trick was, you couldn’t develop a level that had a hallway going over another hallway. Not enough computer horsepower yet to pull that off. This is sometimes called “2.5D”.
Quake brings everything together. Everything’s texture mapped, your levels have true height with things built over other things, and the character models are even fully 3d rendered.
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.
dark souls
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.