Those little things.

[Vor Yang]

So I was playing Skyrim earlier today, made a new character and was trying to roleplay a little. I was going along as an alcoholic Orc who drank every bit of booze in sight.
Now I get to the inn in Whiterun and I take a seat and before I knew it, I was being served by the waitress automatically.

Now I've easily put in over 1000 hours and that was the first time I ever sat down when it wasn't required and when that happened I was stupidly happy about it for some reason.


So my question is: What are those small awesome things you've found in a game you previously thought you knew everything about?

 

[IBlackKiteI]

- Those little lines of dialogue that reference minor things you don't even really remember as all that significant in Deus Ex, from getting berated by your boss for wandering into the ladies restroom to sneaking past a couple of guards rather than killing them.

- Whenever some relatively minor NPC has a bunch of unique lines you can only hear by trying to talk to them over and over again.

- Games or mods where there's multiple variations of models or skins for a particular unit or item. Really makes an army seem diverse when you have a bunch of units of the same type which all look a bit different from each other rather than derived from the exact same barracks-spawned-cannon-fodder soldier template.

- RTS games where units comment on various things beyond just saying 'Moving' or 'Attacking' whenever you order them to do something. Relic games are awesome in this regard. In Dawn of War 2 just about every unit will comment on their movements as they move around and will often call out enemy units by name. Something like 'We're under attack' becoming 'We're under attack from an enemy Warboss' and 'Moving there' becoming 'Shifting from cover, moving to the rubble, taking position by the wall'. Similar sort of thing in Company of Heroes, along with stuff like soldiers in friendly territory complaining about the rain or making fun of nearby allied units. If you pay attention you can sometimes hear some funny stuff when you have American and British units next to each other.
Every time you play a match in either of these games you're likely to hear a unit say something new.

 

[Zhukov]

I've mentioned this before, but I remember being delighted when, in Half Life 2 or one of the Episodes, I took a close look at a dead gunship and noticed that it's rotors were made from gossamer, like a giant dragonfly's wing.

 

[Auron]

Scenes where named NPC's with personalities, minor as they may be, can permanently die if you screw up like the colony dominated by the bizarre plant in ME1 or the Attack on Redcliffe from DA:O and surely many others I don't remember right now.

 

[Shoggoth2588]

I really liked how in Final Fantasy 7, you're rated and given rewards based on how well you can integrate yourself into the lines of marching Shinra soldiers. What really makes it are the news commentators and how they're all "Hey...what's wrong with that one guy?" if you really screw up.

I love how in the original Legend of Zelda, there are quite a few places you can bomb that reveal friendly Moblins that give you money. What makes this better are the number of times when you can do this but get berated by the cave-dweller who then makes you pay to repair the damaged door.