Games and game mechanics that you'd like to see again

[BQE]

Well, it's not an old game by any means, but I've been playing a fair bit of Fire Emblem: Awakening lately, and I really wish more character/story-driven RPGs let you reforge and name your weapons.

Disgaea lets you rename items, and the D2 even lets you change the model of a weapon to any you've wielded prior.

Case in point, my twin archers were wielding Conviction and Clemency respectively.
And they were great times.

That being said, I want more games akin to Tactics Ogre, Disgaea, Final Fantasy Tactics and not so much the systems in place in Agarest. The story is fine honestly, but the combat system pales in my comparisons to these prior mentions.

Yep, this is the biggest and least discussed loss to gaming. FPS games got dumbed down to become a household product; the old stuff is locked up like the necronomicon and developers dare not speak it's name or read from the book. To do that would be to kill the cash cow that is Battlefield and CoD.

I always get a chuckle when I see people arguing about how BF and CoD are nothing alike- any game with a heavy movement penalty on cone of fire that forces you stop moving to shoot is an anti-twitch game and it's all the same to me.
That's why nobody likes old skool run and gun/twitch games- they were hard and you could be beaten mercilessly. The games these days, everyone gets kills, everyones a winner- and if you kill X people in a row, hell, the game will kill a few more people for you in the form of a kill streak reward. Way to go winner!

Here's where I both agree and disagree with you. If you were to compare Call of Duty and Battlefield based solely on those merits, then it's a simple logical deduction to presume they are quite similar, though it's far from the case in reality.

I can understand your dissatisfaction with the mechanisms in place in most modern shooter entries.
I can understand that you feel that these games may "cater" to those playing it, and perhaps be less 'skill-based' as a result of so many additional features.
I can understand the frustration involved with having something you enjoy mutate into something you do not.

However, is it not unfair to blame these games on the death of your beloved games? The market often decides what is predominant with a fair number of competitors copying the best selling franchise.

You know this already.

Is it not more accurate to assert that games with high skill floors would be less endearing than something a bit more simple and approachable? Whether people refuse or simply unable to "get on one's level" isn't grounds to denigrate the more successful evolution of the genre.

That said, you are correct in a number of ways. The world is quite large enough to accomodate entires of both styles, and it can be incredibly disappointing to see more attention showered upon aberrant versions of a game you adore. It's shameful to me that that there are so many more attempts at mimetic success rather than robustness and diversity within all genres.

You have my sincerest condolences, and trust me, I feel your pain in quite a similar fashion.

 

[Bostur]

- city building games like Pharaoh, Zeus and Caesar - the road + movement mechanism. If you dont know what im talking about, the buildings in that game had NPS spawning who would walk on roads connected to the building and spread the service that way. For ex the guard would lower crime in all buildings he'd pass by. Personally I liked it, as it meant thay you had to plan the streets, roadblocks etc for an efficient city and gave an extra layer of complexity. Right now the only game I can compare those to is Anno, but there its all circles.

Did you play some of the Tropico games? They have much of the same mechanics, and I think a bit more depth and variation. The Settlers series also work in a bit of the same way.

When we don't see these types of games very often, I think it may be because it's hard to put variation into the mechanics. I usually enjoy those types of games for a while, but then I usually reach a point where I have figured out the optimal way to build things, and then those games become somewhat repetitive.

 

[IBlackKiteI]

Sacrifice.

Sweet Jesus, freakin Sacrifice.
It's a third person RTS...thing where you play as a wizard and field armies of various freakishly awesome creatures whilst smashing the crap out of the enemy wizard and his army with your own army and a wide array of offensive spells. (aside from mechanics it had brilliant creature design and voice acting, both of a quality you don't seem to often see anymore.)
I'd love to the see the whole on the field RTS thing make a comeback. There's been a few attempts over the years but I don't recall playing or seeing one that good besides Sacrifice (often games where you can jump in and control any unit on the field, but there's rarely any actual reason to and their abilities are so limited you don't have much fun doing it anyway). There's so much that could be done with this sort of thing, it's truly a unique game when you can be directing and supporting massive forces while right in the thick of it as a superpowered commander and while Sacrifice was a bit limited we've probably got enough tech and crap now to really make another game like this really come to life.

Also, the Brothers In Arms style squad control thing. While I don't reckon the series was ever really that exceptional I loved the usefulness and ease of use of the squad system. In many shooters where you control a squad often the best way to go about it is simply to keep them on follow mode and play it like a regular shooter, or maybe set them up in an obvious 'kill everything from here without getting scratched' position for an entire firefight (much as I love 'em the ME series and Republic Commando are pretty guilty of this). In BiA if you simply drag your guys around you all the time you will have no ability to do anything because your bunched up group will quickly get pinned and flanked, and if you aren't constantly re-positioning and re-targeting your squad in response to what the enemy is doing you will get screwed over. Improve on that stuff, put it into an FPS with more kickass shooting mechanics, responsive artificial intelligence that's actually responsive and intelligent and a load of variety and odds are you'd get one of the best shooters in a long time.

There can only be one answer to this.

Age of Mythology.

Seriously. Whoever wound up with the IPs after Ensemble's collapse needs to get off their ass and start make Age games again. They were awesome RTS, and I'd like to see some new entries.

And Mythology in general needs a sequel. You can have armies running around with Cyclopes and fire giants as members, and smite your enemies with meteor storms! How can that not be awesome?

Oh hell YEAH. I think I'm gonna get to reinstalling that one right now.

...while beating my head against the desk groaning about the lack of a sequel.

 

[Baddamobs]

The micro-management of Evil Genius was a nifty feature, especially combined with the fact that your minions could betray you, and the fact you could see the ladder of training that a lower guard took to become a sniper. Holding out that the EGO sequel is going to keep at least a few of these features >_>''''.

 

[WhiteFangofWhoa]

Speaking of toggling features on and off; cheat menus. Cheat codes in general like big head, super speed...we have unlimited lives and, regenerating health so I guess...the opposite of those things.

This. I was just discussing Goldeneye the other day and wondered why no modern FPS has a DK mode, Super Speed, Paintball mode or anything fun like that. Even Enemy Rockets could be amusing if you were given lots of NPC allies, or make a Fists Only cheat that applies to everyone. By themselves, Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, Goldeneye and Perfect Dark probably have more unlockable cheats than all current-gen games combined, and I remember Turok actually had one weird mode that let you see the damage values of each enemy body part.

To this day I think Wild Arms 3 is the only game that has let you rename any NPC in the entire game except for the villains, as well as all your spells. But that's mere window dressing- another thing that caught my eye is that there is an NPC named Armengard (or not if you choose to rename her) who had different dialogue for every single day of the year (going by the Playstation clock). Applying that on a grander scale could keep players coming back just to see what's changed each day.

 

[Shoggoth2588]

Speaking of toggling features on and off; cheat menus. Cheat codes in general like big head, super speed...we have unlimited lives and, regenerating health so I guess...the opposite of those things.

This. I was just discussing Goldeneye the other day and wondered why no modern FPS has a DK mode, Super Speed, Paintball mode or anything fun like that. Even Enemy Rockets could be amusing if you were given lots of NPC allies, or make a Fists Only cheat that applies to everyone. By themselves, Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, Goldeneye and Perfect Dark probably have more unlockable cheats than all current-gen games combined, and I remember Turok actually had one weird mode that let you see the damage values of each enemy body part.

I can't tell you how quickly I would buy Call of Duty - Anything number Whatever if there was a way to unlock "fisticuffs" mode (no weapons for anybody) and "RPG" mode (you are inflicting this number value of damage). I completely forgot about that second one...then again I haven't played any of those three games in months.

To this day I think Wild Arms 3 is the only game that has let you rename any NPC in the entire game except for the villains, as well as all your spells. But that's mere window dressing- another thing that caught my eye is that there is an NPC named Armengard (or not if you choose to rename her) who had different dialogue for every single day of the year (going by the Playstation clock). Applying that on a grander scale could keep players coming back just to see what's changed each day.

Why don't modern RPG's do this?! This sounds like the exact thing that WOULD be in a Bethesda RPG!