27
votes
What interesting, uncommon mechanic would you like to see more commonly in video games?
I was wondering about uncommon game mechanics recently and would like to get some inspiration for a possible next project. :)
I personally enjoy games in which a story is generated organically based on the user's gameplay.
Permadeath is something I feel like mostly Roguelikes/lites and EVE online dare tread into. On the one hand I can completely understand why you wouldn't want to play a game where you feel like all of your progress can be easily reset, but on the other it raises the stakes to a whole new level. Yes dying in EVE or Gungeon after you just managed to get a good run is deeply frustrating, but that makes getting out alive that much more rewarding, the lows compliment and accentuate the highs.
I miss that too. The original Everquest was brutal as hell, respawning you after death minus half a level (which was a couple day's grinding) and naked with your items rotting and requiring retrieval from your corpse which was still wherever you died. You had a couple days to get back there or you'd lose your stuff permanently. Also there was plenty of content you couldn't even dream of touching unless you brought 30+ skilled as fuck players with you. There was no room for slackers in those guilds, and since there was a lot of non-instanced content, guilds were usually in direct hardcore competition for creatures/raids/events that spawned one a week or even more rarely.
That sounds like a rough time compared to WoW's kiddie theme park of an MMO (and it was) but where WoW has no real community, Everquest built real, long-term relationships when people worked to overcome the difficulty. It's been two decades and I still know and talk to a lot of the people from my old EQ server.
I'm excited for Pantheon since it's by some of the original Everquest developers and is promising to bring the pain, complexity, challenge, and mystery back to MMOs again. Our old EQ guilds will come out of retirement to play that MMO and I'll definitely be joining them. We'll probably get into and do the beta together too.
Pantheon does look very interesting, I don't think I'm going to commit to it just yet (or at all, MMOs take up a lot of time) but I'll definitely keep an eye out.
I recently got Rust after seeing it was on sale, and it has something kinda like this.
The gist of the game is that you spawn on an island with a few-dozen to a few-hundred other people, and all you have are a rock and a torch. You hack away at trees, stone, metal ore, and such, and try to build yourself a few basic weapons, maybe some clothes, and try to build a base to respawn in (via a sleeping bag you need to craft).
If you die before having a base it's not a huge deal, mostly just annoying. You'll lose all your inventory and respawn somewhere back on the beach.
If you manage to build a base, you'll start working on building up a stockpile of resources, refining some into higher-tier resources, and crafting better weapons & armor while expanding or fortifying your base. If you die outside of the base, it's much worse than dying as a naked because chances are you were carrying much better loot that took you time to find or craft. But if you die because a raider, or a group of them, broke into your base and killed you, there's a good chance they'll destroy your sleeping bag and steal all of your resources and items you had stashed there. Sometimes they'll steal your base too. You can lose nearly all your progress if this happens, and then you'll be a naked on the beach with only your rock and torch again, and have to grind your way back up again. The only consolation is that you'll keep your blueprints, which are recipes for higher-tier items you have to find or learn through gathering a good amount of scrap.
And then, even if you manage to build a massive, impenetrable base, and accrue all top-tier items, and you're the force to be reckoned with on your server, everything on the map gets wiped clean on the first Thursday of every month and you start all over again. You'll usually keep your blueprints, but that's it. Even then, occasionally the blueprints will wipe too. Some servers wipe more often, or wipe blueprints every time.
It's very Sisyphean.
Diablo III Hardcore mode is still my favourite way to play that game. The only problem is that my first "real death" came about because of lag. That's a huge bummer.
Anyone who has played Baldur's Gate 2 knows about the party interjections and interactions - the people you take with you are a talkative bunch, they react to your actions, the world, each other, they complain about smells and even get into fights - and this is not in FMVs or anything, it just randomly happens while you're playing.
Give NPCs some actual life. GTA has pieces of this, but it's very, very scripted and is usually just part of the missions. It just seems so rare.
When they release it on PC I'll look into it.
Oh wait...
Sneezing after looking at bright light, when walking in water, and just randomly. Would make gunfights, sniping and sneaking more "spicy". Also sometimes hiccups, maybe soon after eating a lot. And yawning in serious dialogs and in fights, because this would be funny.
Yea, that's nice. Organically emerging gameplay from the environment in general.
I hope VR and AR gaming will take off in the future like this.
There was a really fantastic co-op vs DM, dungeon crawler, ARPG called Dungeonland that did that extremely well. 1 player was the DM who could shape the levels, choose which creatures/traps/towers spawned (based on available pts) and even directly take control of creatures/bosses, and 3 players had to co-op fight their way through the DM created levels. Sadly they closed the online servers in April and took the game off Steam and the Paradox store. :(
Haha, the glass cannon artifact and playing with a friend was the only way I could beat the game.
And counterintuitively after I got the choose-your-own-item one I was barely able to get past the first level. I spent too long trying to think of great item combos.
That was probably my favourite aspect of the game. Stacking items was every so often deliciously OP.
I think that games biggest flaw was that it could only handle a few thousand enemies in the level at once. Somebody needs to write an opencl gpu pathfinder to take us further.
Cartography and navigation/orienteering.
It's pretty common to see games where you'll build up your map over time by either exploring (fill in as you go) or some version of tower climbing (Ubisoft-style). This works fine, but alternatives to this can be really interesting parts of the game in their own right.
One of my favorite examples is Miasmata, an indie survival/exploration game in which you play as a researcher on a jungle island who is dying from a disease. Your main goal is to explore the island and find the recipe and ingredients for a cure, but your map is blank, and the game never just tells you where you are. Instead, you have to use your compass to triangulate your position against known landmarks. Once you know where you are, you can fill in the map around you based on what you can see, and record the locations of any new landmarks that you can see from there.
This makes getting genuinely lost a real part of the gameplay, you might even know you're in a mapped region, but be unable to log a new landmark because you can't get a good fix on your exact location from where you're standing. You might stumble off a cliff (I really grew to like the slightly clunky momentum driven movement system) into unmapped territory and find a useful shelter, but be unable to find it again if you weren't able to add it to the map. It all came together really nicely, and helped sell the feeling of being a scientist in an unknown world.
Another interesting idea was in Desktop Dungeons, a dungeon-crawler/puzzle game. In that game you explore by moving around the tile-based map, but each time you reveal a new tile you regain health and mana. You can't have more than x HP/Mana, so exploring at full health becomes wasteful, and you have to treat unexplored regions as a resource in their own right.
Lastly, the Eschalon series of old-school-styled RPGs had a more conventional map/minimap system, but made Cartography an actual character skill that could be left at zero or leveled up slowly. At zero, your map was always blank, at one, you could record walls/buildings as you came to them, at two you could record diferent kinds of terrain, and so on. Your map would update as you walked around, and it was always fun to go back and revisit early parts of the game you had mapped with lower skill and see the map fill in with more rich details.
I enjoy AR-type games (Pokemon Go, Ingress) and would love to see games expand on the mechanic of traveling in the real world to travel in the game world. Maybe something like an RPG where you have to walk around the real world? Minecraft meets AR? Etc.