This is a cliche, but of course I have to bring up Oblivion and horse armor. The other is TF2 with lootboxes. I know it wasn't the first game to have real currency random purchases, but it invented the specific style that would later become common throughout the 2010s.

>QTEs >putting story way before gameplay (your first fight probably won't happen until you're several hours in) >basing character models off of their voice actors >having every single line of dialogue be voiced >tons of choices that don't really matter in the end >making everything look dull and "realistic" >in general, spending most of the budget on making it as much like a movie as possible The only thing that saves Shenmue is the world being so fun to explore and interact with.

A well-polished, good game but the undeniable patient zero of linear corridor level design in FPS, singleplayer campaigns focused around narrative with the arcadey fast paced gameplay being reserved for multiplayer, and immersive "not-cutscenes" that led us to two decades of Cowa Dooty.

>>987180 That all came from Medal of Honor, not Half-Life. There were definitely Half-Life clones but Cawadoody and its ilk aren't among them.

1. The original non-port Starflight was an open-world RPG in the early eighties, and it was packed with Easter eggs. Play it with a pencil and paper. 2. Duck Hunt started the whole raging-at-shooting-games trend. 3. 688 Attack Sub had this crazy feature that allowed you to play with other people on the other side of the world in real-time via the internet. You didn't even need servers, because you dialed each other's modems directly. 4. Tetris made puzzle gaming. 5. Dragon's Lair was modern gaming in the early eighties--essentially a movie with awesome graphics and very little actual game play. 6. Rogue invented RNG loot, a dubious distinction.

>>987191 I don't know. They look a lot like Counterstrike.

>>987154 I see...

Morrowind really started the trend of "theme park RPG" that heavily damaged the genre. Many of its fans would get offended at that term because the theme park is nowhere near as obvious as later TES games, but compare earlier RPGs to Morrowind and you can see the difference in design. It also helped pioneer the idea of releasing games broken and unfinished, look at all the game's bugs and quests that aren't properly implemented. I'm going off topic from the OP next, but it also so poorly implemented many of its dice roll mechanics that it turned gamers off them for decades, it's only in recent years have you started seeing dice rolls make a comeback in mainstream gaming. As well as turning people off of dice rolls, it also helped spawn the rise of waymarkers. >Why, it doesn't have any? The directions and instructions quests give you can be so vague you need to just guess what you're meant to do or look up a guide. Just think about all the times the quest log/NPC tells you to "go left" or "head north for awhile", god forbid you do something else first, better hope you remember exactly what you were doing and where on the map you were when you were given those directions. For a specific example, look at the quest that asks you to look for somebody "east of the Red Mountain". That's literally half of the map.

>>987304 I recall Morrowind having pretty decent quest directions, including specific locations or people you could ask around an area for (which in itself was also a feature in TES 2). >For a specific example, look at the quest that asks you to look for somebody "east of the Red Mountain" Which quest are you referring to?

>>987222 >2. Duck Hunt started the whole raging-at-shooting-games trend. Huh? I highly doubt it was the first shooting game people ever got mad at. There was a lightgun for the Odyssey. Hell, lightgun games have existed since the '30s, but they were originally mechanical and didn't use video, and I'm sure people have been getting mad at them since day one. >4. Tetris made puzzle gaming. You just hate puzzle games on principle?

>>987304 >>987304 >Morrowind really started the trend of "theme park RPG" that heavily damaged the genre I think that was Baldur's Gate II, as much as I love the game.

What kind of ridiculous nonsense is this op? Cover shooters have always been a thing well before that and it all started in a fucking arcade. Just because you don't like them doesn't make them shit either

>emphasis on cover system Kill Switch predated that 1 year before Everything or Nothing

>>987567 Rail shooters had cover mechanics (not "always," though), but they're kind of a different thing. Unless I'm missing some obvious non-rail shooter in the arcade with cover mechanics. I can't think of any 3D non-rail shooters in the arcades at all.

Might be slightly off-topic (as it isn't so much "ahead of the times" as "was directly responsible") but WoW has been a complete disaster for fantasy video games. Through the first two expansions it had absolutely god-tier art and music (I would honestly put its music up against any other zone ambience without a second thought) but its staggering popularity meant that absolutely everyone ripped it off without being able to do it half as well and so we've been stuck with it as the default for fantasy games ever since. Even fucking D&D ripped it off starting in 4th edition.

>>996719 Same thing happened with Diablo II.

>>996719 (pic only tangentially related) >Even fucking D&D ripped it off starting in 4th edition. No, 4E has effectively nothing to do with WoW or MMOs, be it in mechanics, character building, encounter design, or whatever. The one part that does clearly take inspiration there is the class roles, but 4E actually does it very differently. Which is what I want to mention in fact. I strongly believe that 4E concepts of both healers and tanks are even to this day ahead of schedule. The leader classes of 4E are required to actually hit (and thus damage) enemies to apply buffs to party - unless they want to use their action to outright give more attacks to heavy hitters (the classic "warlord attacks with the barbarian" approach to leading). The primary healing ability of every leader is notable for not using up your standard action for the turn at all, so the leader gameplay is a far cry from being a healbot. The defender classes, on the other hand, are really different. The reason for this is that it'd be unnatural to force aggro mechanics on monsters controlled by an actual person (not to mention the problem of turning the same against player-controlled characters). Instead, defenders work with softer control mechanisms, and those might yet be in demand if and when all those AI developments will result in games having actual smart enemies that would be similarly hard to control with simple threat tracking. And for completeness, the 4E defender classes use two things: the "mark" penaltizing attacks not directed at the defender, and further "punishment" abilities for disrespecting it anyway. The 4E idea of tanking is not "hey, you are now forced to target me only" and more "hey, now you have two choices: pointlessly claw at my hard armored butt, or try to hit those squishy boys behind me, and watch as I hit you in the face or render your flailings even less effective"

>>987148 Shit you have a point.

>>996826 It was poorly phrased but I was talking specifically about the art as far as its destructive legacy was concerned; the prime example is the transformation of tieflings from Wilbur Whateley to space goats.

The Sims pioneered modern DLC with its shitty piecemeal expansions.

>>997478 >The Sims pioneered modern DLC with its shitty piecemeal expansions. Eh. I think it certainly contributed but how simulation games interact with DLC isn't really analogous to how other types of games interact with DLC because simulation games are basically digital toy collections and DLC is just adding more toys to the box - and in that regard, most of them actually offer not insignificant value. The DLC for Dovetail's train sim games for example is painstakingly modeled because the DLCs are made by and for autists and even if you spend hundreds of dollars on digital trains it's still cheaper than doing it IRL and they also offer an experience that IRL scale models can't.

>>996719 >>996826 Well they're somewhat reverting course from that and focusing more on world content now. Granted it's still not amazing but it's a step in the right direction. Plus they said they're going to focus more on the casual audiences in one of the interviews. Usually that sounds awful but in truth when it comes to MMO this is usually a good thing. Though you can go overboard as well