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What are some of your favorite game mechanics?
What mechanics are the most fun, innovative or immersive?
I'll start with my list.
Enemies reacting to your gameplay choices in MGS V
I still think that game is a masterpiece when it comes to stealth gameplay and generally reaxtive gameplay but I thought that the system of enemies adapting to your gameplay choices was particularly clever.
The parkour system in Dying Light
I don't think any other game has pulled this off that well. Combined with the stressful night sequences this made that game a sleeper hit for me.
The lack of weapons in Subnautica
This is what turned this into one of my favourites of this year. It really makes you feel vulnerable, especially in the beginning, making for some very atmospheric and creepy gameplay.
Games For Windows Live, IIRC. It was pretty awful at launch, I think I ended up buying the game and then playing a cracked copy anyway because it so obnoxious.
Hopefully they've either fixed or removed it by now, because the game itself is really nice.
I think mental wear and tear is a fun mechanic, which you see done well in games like Rimworld and Sunless Seas. Even if it's just a status bar that needs to be filled, the idea that people in the kinds situations that are common in video games would take a mental toll has always been cool to me.
Also I think the easy drop-in/out mechanics of Lego games and Rayman: Legends is really amazing if you have kids and you like to play games with your kids. Makes shit a lot less taxing.
Sunless Seas is actually a good example of a weird mechanic I haven't seen many other games use; that of reifying stories and human interactions into tangible gameplay objects that you can collect and trade.
The resource and stats system in that game were initially so utterly foreign and mysterious that it added a lot to the overall sense of foggy mystique that I loved.
I really loved everything about the game, and the only reason I'm not playing Sunless Skies now is that I'm holding off till they're closer to being done so I can experience everything as a surprise. We'll see, now that I've talked about it I'll probably boot it up this afternoon lol.
But yeah, Sunless Seas did a lot of things very well, and just trying to decipher the world built around it was one of the most fun parts. I even played Fallen London for a bit so I could better understand, but I got worn out on the grind that game became.
The way Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons has you control the brothers to interact with each other, especially the way that feature is used to deliver emotional moments near the end of the game. It's really a fantastic example of how you can use the unique features of gaming to tell a story in ways no other medium can.
The cartography mechanic in Miasmata, an island exploration/survival game which has you navigate by manually triangulating your location from known landmarks, and slowly filling out a map of the area in the process. I love a lot of things about that game, but just wandering around getting lost in the forest, and then trying to figure out where I'd ended up was my favorite part.
Portals, from Portal. I don't think I need to elaborate, but if I do, then you should just go play it yourself. It's surprisingly short and accessible, and is pretty much required reading for anyone interested in first person puzzle games.
I'll also throw in the grenades from 0Space. They're basically just grenades, and the third weapon after your gun and sword, but the fact that you can shoot a grenade in flight to explode it early, drop it on the ground as a landmine, or that objects at the right distance from the explosion will be pushed away rapidly instead of destroyed, makes them the perfect tool for breaking up stalemates and enabling high-risk/high-reward tricks like grenade-jumping, or exploding around corners. 0space is up there with Nidhogg and Samuri Gunn as one of my favorite competitive party games, and grenades are a big part of why it works.
I'm not sure it really counts as a game mechanic directly, since it isn't relevant to your actual gameplay, but the way Super Meat Boy recorded and displayed all your previous attempts each time you finished a level always made that moment feel even more simultaneously silly, impressive, and cathartic.
Edit: I almost forgot: Trees. In Dota 2. A few years ago when I started to get tired of League of Legends and began to pick up Dota, "weird fiddly things you can do with trees" was one of the biggest differentiators in my mind. They can be destroyed or planted to grant or deny line of sight, you can run around crooked little paths in the dense parts of the forest to hunt or hide, you can cut them down in just the right places to create strategic paths to areas of interest, and some heroes have additional weird interactions on top of all that. Dota, to me, is all about the player having lots and lots of small tools and tricks that they can put together in creative ways to gain an advantage, and trees are a big part of that.
Man I'd totally forgotten reading juking guides, specifically popping into a tree path then using phase boots to run back out through anyone chasing. I guess planting iron wood branches gives even more options these days!
Balancing without relying on randomness is something I always deeply admire. My best example for this is actually from boardgames, between the Settlers of Catan and Scythe I highly prefer the latter because most of the strategizing is actually done based on lack of very little but very vital information. There is almost no randomness to the game, and even when there is it's actually very controlled. This, I think, creates a more satisfying gameplay because now actions and outcomes all flow from the players and you feel less beholden to the luck of the draw.
Randomness in games like Catan often serve to level the playing field a bit between more and less experienced play I think. If you're playing between people of a similar skill level, it feels like it ends up giving the win to players who don't deserve it some of the time.
I'll have to check out Scythe though.
For me as an FPS player it's definitely bunny-hopping.
I was to young for the early days of quake and CS:GO but when I got introduced to it via Titanfall (its engine is based on source) I absolutely fell in love with it. Funnily enough bunny-hopping was not intended for the game but when QA found out it was possible to do and that the engine developers were trying to remove it, they managed to convince them to keep.
While both the first and second game have lost most of its population it's nice to see a small competitive group still have a go at it.
I've never quite managed to get the hang of it myself, but watching speedrunners abuse the "fix" that Valve tried to apply in Half Life 2 is never short of amazing.
For those unfamiliar: in order to prevent bunny-hopping in that game, the engine just pushes you backwards so that any extra speed you would have gained off the jump is negated. Fortunately for speedrunners, the game doesn't consider your actual velocity vector when applying that push, it just pushes you backwards relative to wherever the user is facing. This means that if you carefully bunny-hop backwards the game will keep shoving you faster and faster. You can't see where you're going, but you'll get there hilariously fast.
In World of Warcraft's Firelands raid, there was this one boss that required a player to loot an item off the ground which caused them to fly, and they had to jump through hoops of fire in the sky while the rest of the players fought the Boss on the ground. I realize this is really specific, but it's probably the most fun I've ever had in a game (related to mechanics, anyway).
Darkmoon Faire has a mini-game like that if you feel like doing some flying.
Oh I know! I always go do that mini game if I'm bored and DMF is up. Not as quite much fun as the boss fight though :)
The Dwarven Atom Smasher. Kill anything under a certain size, and even them if they're caged.
Abilities that give you freedom to sequence break, like walljumping, shinesparking, infinite bomb jumping in Super Metroid. There's even a way to sacrifice your ammo to heal yourself, so you can actually play through that game killing the bosses in reverse order if you are good enough and want a challenge (normally you'd need the Varia suit to go through lower Norfair since the heat will constantly damage you, but it doesn't outright block you). The mechanics that give you more freedom to play how you want really increases the replayability and challenge and truly make it a timeless classic.