TA Top Five: Gaming Mechanics Of This Gen

The only thing I might have added to this list would be Music Games, but they burned out so fast and hard that their impact probably won't carry forward.

Awesome!!

Achievements ftw!

One game mechanic that I always find frustrating is AI teammates

Honourable mention for Multiplayer Parties and Party Chat? Or was Parties available on Xbox? Can't remember.

this is the first list I am almost in complete accord. the only changes I'd make would be to replace #5 with "drop in coop"

Nothing with Dark Souls. Another perfect Top 5!

^ This

Disagree with the collectables, i hate all collectables. Except i didn't mind the ones in arkham city as it was fun figuring out how to get them!

Clown Syndr0me said:I hate collectables for the sake of being a collectable. The audio diaries in Bioshock at least had a purpose, they gave background on the universe; or perhaps the skulls in Halo, giving you the option to alter gameplay. Collectibles like Cog tags in Gears of War, or flags in Assassins Creed serve no purpose.

My favourite mechanic of this generation was scooter from borderlands :-D

Gears Of War 2's Horde is my Fav thing of this gen.
It's why Epic will always have a place as a top dev.

How about patches? They seem quite important with all the buggy games being released nowadays.

I fail to see how these are good mechanics.

- Leveling usually entails massive grinds in the 50+ hour range. Who wants that when there are plenty of other games to experience. If the game is good, people will keep playing it. Leveling is lazy development and shows lack of ingenuity, just like pointless collectibles.
- Killstreaks. Encourages camping and spawn camping, teammates blocking doors and narrow pathways preventing tactical teamwork, etc. Again, how is that good for games?
- Multiplayer perks. Great, so someone can pick heartbeat sensors or invisibility. To what end? More camping.

What happened to multiplayer gaming where success was measured in skill, reflexes, teamwork, and tactics; not sitting in a spot waiting for someone to pass in front of the crosshairs to add a tally to the killstreak reward. Levels in games mean nothing any more. Either you boost your levels or resort to killstreak tactics to level up.

These are your best mechanics? No, these are the poisons of multiplayer gaming.

I love and need achievements in my games. but I think they also can have a negative influence over the way we play our games today.

Now players find them self's playing the achievements, not the game.

Seriously 3.0 on Gears of War 3 would be a good example of this.

sm182 said:Double-edged sword. I tend to believe that publishers/developers push out games earlier and with less quality checking, due to assurance that they can always patch it later on. It gives us some poor initial user experience. It has also made me wait for a month after release, so that I know I can play a game without save vanishing

That said, games are a lot more complicated than the days of 8 or 32-bit!

BioShock's audio logs are inherited from it's big brother System Shock.

Great list!!!!

Rikk Bird said:And furthermore, something that tends to be forgotten when we look at the past with rose-tinted glasses, there were plenty of buggy games before "nowadays". The never seemed as prevalent because, due to the bugginess and the fact they couldn't be fixed easily without a recall of everything, they would just never sell and fall to the bargain of bargain bins.

Plus, some companies clearly use patches as free publicity, seeing as how every gaming site reports on even the smallest of patches nowadays. So if they release a game in even a perfect state, but then release a patch saying "fixed an issue where the main character's foot would step into the wall on level "Big Bang", suddenly everyone is running an article putting their game on the front page, and at least one person is thinking "hey, they fixed it up and its a bit cheaper now, I'll go purchase it!". Patches have become as much about good business strategy as much as they are about fixing things.

This....isn't a serious list, is it?