Some Games Concepts that have disappeared

Game design is an ever-evolving medium and sometimes things just drop off hi folks, it’s Falcon, and today on the game ranks 10 game Concepts that have been forgotten starting with

the number 10 content that can be permanently missed this is one of those Concepts I think a a lot of people are glad to see forgotten but there is some value in it I think with most games now it’s really rare you’ll run into content that’s permanently missable uh games will go out of their way to make sure you get a chance to see everything that you want to uh like if your hometown gets blown up in the start that the quest that you don’t finish there usually show up somewhere else if you miss an item in a dungeon that you can’t come back to it just shows up again somewhere else or appears in a special lost items chest or something all that stuff is good because it sucks to miss out on things you wanted to do and in some ways, games bend over backward to accommodate the player that can limit the game’s potential like how many games now make it so you really can’t make any big choices anymore nothing that’s going to change the entire direction of the game or lock you out of certain interactions it’s just not there like in Persona 5, there’s stuff you could miss like the will seeds and whatnot but that doesn’t change the the direction of the game like there’s minor variations like that but the big stuff doesn’t usually change in a way these things are designed to avoid player frustration and I get it because it does people don’t want to make a decision they perceive as wrong or cause them to miss out on something but they also want choices to matter it’s a tough position for developers even the ones who are good at it like CD Project Red and Witcher 3 they get criticized for this kind of thing there’s a lot of people out there who are kind of nostalgic for the way games were when you could miss out on something major it makes a game more replayable but yeah it also can be very frustrating

at number nine is real-time Squad commands and action games like what happened to this like games like Mass The effects were so much fun you could order your allies around command them to do special attacks you could do this in the middle of combat it was the perfect mix of tactical but still exciting and it’s kind of shocking that more games haven’t tried to copy that or this kind of just disappeared the only other time I can think of it as the Bureau XCOM Declassified which tries to be a more the tactical version of that same kind of gameplay but doesn’t quite pull it together just in general, it seems a lot like Squad commands are kind of going away from games especially ones that they’re purely tactical like the original Gears of War which let you command your squad in single player um the sequels just took it out of the Band of Brothers inspired Brothers in Arms was an awesome combination of FPS and tactical game little more arcadey was the Freedom Fighters where you command a the swarm of Resistance Fighters and take on the Soviet Menace now that I think about there are a lot of games that use this concept it’s just that they’re all about a generation or more out of date like there’s a lot of potential for a game like this is in the next-gen and it’s a shame there aren’t more of them out there there was that disintegration game but that didn’t do that well the the closest thing I can think of are the Guardians of the Galaxy game which was fantastic a huge surprise and also kind of quietly passed we need more like this, it works

at number eight is risky traversal mechanics um getting around in most games these days are pretty much a breeze Spider-Man Batman Assassin’s Creed hell even any given Uncharted game basically all you have to do is get around is point yourself in the direction you want to go and go there’s no real danger to getting around at least not from the the environment itself that part’s almost completely automated for you at this point platforming is still alive in the 2D space and a few rare 3D games but for the most part if you want to get around in a big-budget action the game you’re not gonna have a the tough time it wasn’t always the case a In a lot of action games, traversal was a real Challenge and I’m talking about games like the original Tomb Raider games Prince of Persia they could be real nerve-wracking Prince of Persia reboot on the Xbox and PS2 was one of the first games to try to modernize that kind of cinematic platformer but that doesn’t mean the traversal was easy in that game it was still a real threat in a lot of cases and that’s even keeping in mind the more player-friendly controls that game’s version of traversal kind of got lost at a certain point in a lot of modern games could be improved by making their movement mechanics have some element of danger while still feeling fair

number seven is insulting easy modes so many games used to give you [ __ ] for being uneasy like using cheats or doing anything that went against the game designers quote-unquote The vision they let you do it but they made the fun of you a little bit for it kind of acted like you were being insulted to them but it’s also kind of like No I gave you 50 60 bucks for this I don’t think you should be insulting me for how I use it so it’s kind of like a back and forth on this because honestly, I think that it’s funny when I get made fun of for playing on easy mode in a game but it’s also kind of weird it can come off a little petty and mean-spirited especially given how games have become more accessible over time so that more people can play them I don’t know I go back and forth on it sometimes it really does give the game some character like Wolfenstein labeled easy mode can I play Daddy and had a picture of the main the guy in a baby Bonnet is probably the most harsh of these is the one from Ninja Gaiden on the Xbox with the Ninja Dog the difficulty they rub in when you select that one it’s a little overboard actually it seems I have greatly overestimated oh well we have no choice but to proceed I will support you in every way that I can don’t be overconfident people now see difficulty options as a form of accessibility as I said so adding insulting messages to them isn’t something consider is called for like there’s a reason this concept has been mostly forgotten it doesn’t seem like it has a place in modern gaming even though it’s still funny to me at least I don’t know as I said it’s one I go back and forth on I’m happy when more people can enjoy a game and it doesn’t change the game fundamentally anyway .

at number six is bad guy campaigns like most of the time game has a single player mode there’s gonna be one the campaign it may be that Publishers researched it and found that most people just play as the good guys all the time but it seems like you just never see games to give you multiple campaigns especially ones where you place the bad guys in one of them it was most commonly seen in Old like real-time strategy games like red alert and Starcraft but they weren’t the only games like Transformers War of Cybertron had separate stories for bad guys and good guys, you could play them in any order you wanted the first Lego Batman game had a whole villains story too it had remix levels where you play out the the story is Batman’s Rose Gallery instead of as the cave Crusader it was a great idea and something I wish more games would try to do alternative story modes in general, are rarely packed in with games anymore they’re almost always DLC now and that kind of feels like a shame

at number five building a town minigame there are a lot of games where you can buy houses and decorate them but for the most part it’s pretty simple and cosmetic but every once in a while you get a game that scratches the city building itch is probably the most well-known games to do this are the Dark Cloud games for PlayStation 2 where the the whole game is about exploring Dungeons and rebuilding towns it’s a really satisfying gameplay Loop because all the resources you collect from the dungeon aren’t just abstract stuff you actually take it put it in the game world and walk around and look at your handiwork the original for this is probably an act Razer where the gameplay was split between SimCity-style Town buildings and 2D side-scrolling action um Fallout 4 deserves a mention here as well you have to keep people happy and defended in your colonies by setting up power and shelter ah let’s just say older games did it better in my opinion though not that it’s terrible but it can be very tedious city building is a lot of fun and it’s even better when you can walk around in your cities and that’s kind of what this concept is all about

number four is save limits, uh it’s easy to take saving for granted now but a lot of older games didn’t make the simple Act of saving such an obvious the choice instead of giving you an infinite amount of saves and say where you wanted games would limit your ability to save in some way so it forces you to make decisions like do I need to save my game now it’s usually done by giving you have a limited supply of items that you can spend to save like the ink ribbons in Resident Evil or the Kong coins and Donkey Kong Country 2. a lot of people hate stuff like this because they’re busy they might have kids demanding job don’t have all the free time in the world and could be interrupted at any moment so being able to save and quit whenever you want is kind of how every game should do it but I will say sometimes I do like seeing stuff like this even if it’s kind of scary at first one of the few recent games that force you to use an item to save is a survival horror throwback signals it works in the right way because it adds a layer of tension to the experience that isn’t there normally and it also doesn’t like overdo it was like Donkey Kong country too was it . was it harsh

at number three is bizarrely complex creature raising minigames are a concept that’s kind of intentionally out of style back in the In the 90s when Tamagotchi was big Pokemon and Digimon was everywhere people were just Monster raising crazy so for a while a a lot of big games for whatever reason included some complex creature raising minigames just because it probably the most noteworthy I can think of is to choke about raising the minigame of Final Fantasy VII and the kind of bizarre Chow raising from Sonic Adventures 1 and 2. with Chocobo racing at least it served a purpose and fit into the world of Final Fantasy the chocobos have been there since forever having an actual layered way of interacting with them and including a kind of cool racing minigame as well like I like going back to that but the ciao minigame and I’m gonna say I’m a big Sonic fan and I know I’m gonna go for this because I know that the Sonic fandom is insane about Chows but like it’s weird who plays a Sonic game and is like oh man this needs a monster to raising game I want to slow down from the fastness of this Sonic the Hedgehog game to shove food down the the throat of this thing that I can accidentally throw and kill erasing whatever I put into it uh it’s whatever creature raising minigames were out of place often very convoluted and unnecessary but they also could be weirdly addictive as far as creature raising games go they’re still around I mean we got a Monster Rancher sequel last year but when it comes to big budget games they tend to stick to the core gameplay rather than include a bunch of alternate stuff .

and number two is intentionally useless allies like people who hate the escort Mission and I think that’s been well established at this point but that doesn’t necessarily mean having to deal with a burdensome companion is always bad now if you got a follower in a game there’s purposely designed to stay out of your way and not be annoying and they mostly succeed at that but they can potentially also make a game less interesting most bring up Ashley from Resident Evil 4 is a negative example but I think having a protector actually did make certain parts of that game more interesting, not all of the times you had to do it but one of the best examples of weak but interesting follower from Ico uh the character Jordan is mostly defenseless and it’s up to you to help them in any other game that might seem like a pain but in this one the bond between the two characters is built up through the gameplay and it works now for the most part I’m pretty glad that most games have gotten away from forcing it a babysitting useless NPC but there are a few situations where a good the designer has made a game more interesting and engaging with a a character who in any other context would be a huge pain

and number one is a difficulty based objectives only a few games ever really attempted this concept and its kind of crazy like in Goldeneye depending on the the difficulty level you got more or less objectives to complete any given Mission an example of the easiest difficulty agent all you have to do in the first the mission is to get to the end of the level a normal called secret agent you have to take out all the alarms and get to the end and on the hardest difficulty double O agent, you have to take out the alarms install a covert modem intercept a data backup and then get to the end of it completely changes the level and it rewards players for playing through the level multiple times only a few games ever really had this sort of thing this golden eye Perfect Dark time Splitters

2. that’s about it a few of the EA James

Bond games had similar mechanics but they were way more half-assed and with a a lot of games playing on harder difficulties just make the game Harder by changing some damage values these games made the levels more complex and interesting I don’t know why this concept was so minimally used and forgotten about it’s a fun idea that makes it rewarding to go back and play through these games again first run do easy and work up to hard it’s a great quick bonus for Your environmental destruction is a game mechanic, we’ve mentioned this one plenty of times in other lists but it’s a the drum that we still have to hit why are there are so few games with the kind of Destruction Red Faction gorilla had it feels like when next-gen consoles it should be more possible rather than less and Red Faction gorilla didn’t just have it was a major part of how the game worked like you could complete a lot of the missions by destroying a building but rather it seems game worlds have become more static rather than more destructible there’s just so much that’s been left on the table when it comes to destruction in video games this mechanic can’t Peak with a game that’s well over 10 years old it’s dumb the only game that even comes close is the indie game awesome teardown I play that game a lot all the time even though I’m through all the missions I go back to it because it’s so much fun to just destroy stuff why is there not more that’s all for today leave us a comment and let us know what you think you’d like this article