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Small things in games that add a lot

deuxhero

Arcane
Joined
Jul 30, 2007
Messages
11,326
Location
Flowery Land
Suikoden replacing "Run" with "let go" when you are significantly more powerful than the enemy.
 

No Great Name

Arcane
Joined
Jan 24, 2014
Messages
572
Location
US
I've been playing the english translation of Tales of Phantasia lately and there are a good number of little graphical details such as reflections, shadows, and environmental critters (fuck the crabs at the seaports sometimes). The game even has a built in graphic EQ for the player to mess with. I can't think of another SNES game that does such things.
 

Jazz_

Arcane
Joined
Jun 13, 2016
Messages
1,069
Location
Sea of Ubiquity
Npc schedules and dynamic events in general (can be weather, or things that change in the world over time), when npcs just stand there like lifeless husks it bugs me, breaks muh immershun, in AoD for instance every npc just stands there still in the same spot doing nothing and looking at nothing like dead automatons.
 

Vorark

Erudite
Joined
Mar 2, 2017
Messages
1,394
- The Dachora and Etecoons teaching you about shinespark and the wall jump techniques in Super Metroid -- no tutorials, no hand holding. Also, being able to save them when Zebes is about to blow up.

- Helping them again in Fusion. The egg the dachora was protecting in Super hatched and there's a little dachora too. Turns out this time these guys ended up saving Samus.
 

PulsatingBrain

Huge and Ever-Growing
Patron
Joined
Nov 5, 2014
Messages
6,163
Location
The Centre of the Ultraworld
Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Codex+ Now Streaming! Enjoy the Revolution! Another revolution around the sun that is. My team has the sexiest and deadliest waifus you can recruit. Pathfinder: Wrath
Realistic silence with ambient world sounds. There was a moment in The Witcher 2 where I was in a city, and it was pretty quiet, some people kind of milling around and it began to rain onto the cobbles. I was legit stunned by the simple beauty of it
 

Abhay

Augur
Joined
Aug 12, 2013
Messages
204
Location
India
1. Mafia - The *automatic* transition between third person to first person in narrow areas when you're slightly too close, taking cover behind behind any solid object, including vehicles. The various camera angles for vehicles also added towards making the driving experience much better than other open world games, including the support for wheels which makes the racing part so much fun. The simplistic, yet refreshing wanted system with different kinds of police state over the traditional GTA games with the constantly spawn cops based on the stupid flashing star(s) system, making the police chases in Mafia very much enjoyable.
2. Arx Fatalis - Spell system of drawing runes with a mouse on screen first before using it
3. Far cry 2 - First person animations. 4. Hidden and Dangerous 2 - Map giving you live enemy positions, if you pull up right at the moment when they are scripted to spawn. Very useful to avoid any casualty, since you can immediately switch to the man positioned at a distant location and take them out yourself quickly to overcome the A.I's inability to react quickly and eliminate the closest threat first, rather than randomly picking the targets to shoot. These live positions flash on the map without any warnings on screen and for very few seconds, so it doesn't make it entirely easy for the player to get accurate movement to movement positions but simply a quick flash on the map indicating the point of spawn and direction of the enemy.
 
Joined
Apr 5, 2013
Messages
2,430
I especially like the small parts of mechanics that are... dunno... satysfating while being done.

1. Doing uppercut in Mortal Kombat 1-Trilogy + War Gods (aka Mortal Kombat 4 testing field). Ground is shaking, 1/5 of HP is lost, you fell POWER. Main disadvantages of MK4 is uppercut being underpowered.
2.Doom, castet in berserk mode that instagib Imps - fucking love it!
3. Super Shotgun in Q2 / Shotgun in SiN - close ranged torso-fuckshot,yeah!
4. Turing into dust aliens in Another World with lasergun.
5. Dink Smallwood - the sound of krrrrrhk when cutting through ducks and dat grey crawling things.
6. Destructing environment in Red Faction.
7. Instagibbing everything with Ion Ripper in Q2.
8. Doing suicide with possessed aliens in Abe'S Odyssey / Exodus.
9. Finally, destroying shit with Molotov's coctails in Myth: The Fallen Lords. Bungie was fucking awesome! I especially like the mission (12th? 14th?) when player is under the siege and his main forces consist of dwarves throwing coctails down the hill.
 

the_shadow

Arcane
Joined
Dec 30, 2011
Messages
1,179
Realistic silence with ambient world sounds. There was a moment in The Witcher 2 where I was in a city, and it was pretty quiet, some people kind of milling around and it began to rain onto the cobbles. I was legit stunned by the simple beauty of it

I had a similar experience with Morrowind. The visuals/ambient sounds for the stormy weather in that game were fantastic.
 

sser

Arcane
Developer
Joined
Mar 10, 2011
Messages
1,866,662
Homeworld's sense of scale through sound and graphics was so good I'd happily watch the goddam resource collectors jet around picking up space dust :lol:
 

Hoplopfheil

Literate
Joined
Jan 12, 2017
Messages
27
Location
Deimos
Realistic reload animations and sequences. It's one of those things that doesn't seem crucial, but if you're going to try to make it look realistic, it doesn't take a lot of extra effort to make it 100 percent realistic.

Since Battlefield 3 (I think), the reload animations have been 100 percent realistic, and accurately reflect the chambered round, and reloading from empty or partial magazine. The sound of the gun firing also changes as you get closer to empty, so you get an audible indicator of when you're running out of ammo. It's awesome because short of some kind of rumble motor that can accurately represent what a gun feels like when it locks empty, that's the best you can do.
 

nil

Cipher
Joined
Jan 1, 2012
Messages
317
yoTebD2.png
 

sullynathan

Arcane
Joined
Dec 22, 2015
Messages
6,473
Location
Not Europe
In splinter cell chaos theory, the AI pretty much knew how rooms and environments were supposed to look like. If you moved things around like say open windows, leave lights on, or things like that and they returned to that area they go into a permanent suspicious state even if you did it when they weren't in the vicinity. I don't remember any other stealth game I played doing that.

On a more recent note, the small scale destruction of rainbow six siege allow you to puncture tiny holes to see enemies from the third floor of a house and killing them was really cool.
 

pippin

Guest
Many people praise Rockstar's meticulous world building, but without any doubt my favorite is the inclusion of several radio stations with irl music. It's a banal detail that ends up making all the difference, because the game gives you another source of entertainment, especially if you're interested in music in general, since you enjoy your favorite songs, but also learn about bands you didn't knew yet.
 

ChasinTheTrane

Literate
Joined
Mar 2, 2017
Messages
34
When I first played Battlefield 1, I was impressed by how good the gun sounds were. Every element of using a gun sounding like it would in real life. What truly sold it was how much different each gun sounded.
 

shihonage

Subscribe to my OnlyFans
Patron
Joined
Jan 10, 2008
Messages
7,157
Location
location, location
Bubbles In Memoria
Left4Dead's director AI system which spawned zombies out of line of sight.

The little sunlight shader effect on the ground in original WoW.

NPCs blurbing contextually relevant things on approach in Fallout.

Extended map in some games outside immediate play area, where you get the illusion the world just goes on and on.
 

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