10 Features Developers No Longer Use In Their Games

[drop-cap]L[/drop-cap]ike everything else in the world, the video games industry is constantly changing and evolving. Industry trends, staples, and common practices often fade away and pass into memory, and in this feature, that's what we're talking about. We'll be talking about ten things that were once hugely prevalent in games industry, but have now either becoming very rare, or have faded away completely. INVISIBLE WALLS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-qmKwYl4rk Technology keeps advancing at a rapid rate, which means developers constantly find themselves with new tools to create more ambitious and open games. One very particular byproduct of that in the last decade or so has been that artificial invisible walls that would prevent players from accessing areas in the world that should logically have been accessible are not nearly as common as they once used to be. Of course, we do still getsomeinvisible walls, but thanks to games now being much more expansive than ever before, and the fact that developers have also gotten much better at masking what would once have been invisible walls, means that this is an industry trend that has disappeared almost completely. EXCESSIVE QUICK TIME EVENTS There was once a time, not that long ago, when quick time events wereeverywhere. Across genres and developers, quick time events had infested games like a plague. And sure, some were rather well executed – the oldGod of Wargames are a prime example of that – but the games that used them poorly or used them as a crutch far outnumbered those that used them well. Thankfully, this entire generation has seen those games becoming increasingly rare. QTEs haven't completely gone away, of coruse, but at least they're now used in moderation, and (mostly) only when they make sense... unless you have to press F to pay respects, that is. CHEATS Unlike QTEs and invisible walls, cheat codes are an industry trend whose disappearance we're not happy with at all. Once upon a time, using cheat codes in games was perhaps the greatest way to enjoy them – theGrand Theft Autoseries wouldn't be half as much fun without them, for instance – but for whatever reason, we don't see a lot of them in games anymore. The rise of microtransactions, as well as video game patches and updates, means that cheats of both kind - advertent and inadvertent - now no longer really have a purpose to exist. Things like secret costume unlocks or EXP boosts can easily be sold to the player for a few bucks, rather than handed for free by a secret code, while unintended cheats (such as the item duplication glitches in the old Pokémon games) can now be patched out as soon as they are discovered. Such can be the price of progress, we guess. FMV CUTSCENES Games have tried to tell stories to the best of their ability for as long as they have existed, but it goes without saying that they were also often limited by technological restrains in that regard. The high production values and incredible cutscenes we see in games these days simply weren't possible during, say, the PS1 and N64 era- and so, developers turned to other means to achieve similar effects. One of these was FMV cutscenes, and while they worked (at least for that time), they just never felt right. Jumping from gameplay to live action and then back to gameplay is jarring even with the stellar-looking games of today's day and age, so imagine how jarring it felt with the blocky visuals of the late 90s and early 2000s. STUPIDLY OBVIOUS TUTORIALS Not too long ago, excessively handhold-y tutorials were spreading like a plague in video games, and all too often, you'd play a game that would ingeniously highlight your health bar and say something like, "this is your health bar. It shows you your health." Okay, maybe that specifically never happened, but you get the point. The beginning of this decade, however, blessedly saw games such as Dark Soulsand – strangely enough – Minecraftcoming along and showing to developers at large that spoon-feeding players was not necessary at all. Just look at the progression from Skyward Sword – which bombarded players with painfully obvious and prolonged tutorials every couple of minutes – to Breath of the Wild – which doesn't have any tutorials whatsoever in spite of its massive and expansive nature – to see the significant strides games have made in this area. TACKED-ON MULTIPLAYER https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-qmKwYl4rk Multiplayer and online gameplay caught on like wildfire in the PS3 and Xbox 360 era, and as is the case with anything that becomes popular overnight, developers across the industry started chasing the trend. For some, it meant dropping single player ambitions and putting all their eggs in the online basket. For others, it meant cramming multiplayer modes into games where they had no business being.Mass Effect, God of War, Dead Space, Ninja Gaiden,and so, so many more made the baffling decision to include multiplayer modes, just to chase a trend. Sure, some of them – likeThe Last of Usand the aforementionedAssassin's Creed– had surprisingly excellent multiplayer, but those were the exceptions to the rule. TACKED-ON MOTION CONTROLS Multiplayer wasn't the only thing developers were cramming into their games to chase a popular trend during the seventh console generation. The Wii was the most successful console that generation, selling over 100 million units, and its motion controls weremassive. Both Sony and Microsoft decided they want a piece of that pie. They both went about it in very different ways – Sony just copied the Wii wholesale with the PS Move, while Microsoft did whatever the hell the Kinect was – but both were maddening for the same reason. This was the reason we got games likeStar Wars Kinect. To quote Adam Jensen, we didn't ask for this. STEREOSCOPIC 3D The early years of this decade saw stereoscopic 3D growing in popularity in all visual entertainment media – thanks primarily to James Cameron'sAvatar– and Sony were leading that charge in the games industry. 3D support for the PS3 was something they banked on quite heavily for a good year or two, and it felt like nearly every major game releasing for the system supported 3D in some capacity. And of course, there was Nintendo, who went one step further with the 3DS, that let you enjoy 3D without the need of 3D glasses. Of course, it ultimately turned out to be a fad, but it was one we're glad we got to live through- 3D may not have been as big as some were promising it would be, but it was definitely fun while it lasted. BLACK AND WHITE MORAL CHOICES https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-qmKwYl4rk Morally grey decisions are not a new things in video games, and at least in CRPGs, have been around for decades. But moral choices in the mainstream AAA industry were too binary for far too long. You could either be Superman or General Zod- there was no middle ground, and whatever choices you were making were always very clearly delineated as good and evil choices. TheinFamousandFablegames are perfect examples of this problem. Thankfully, decision-making and writing in games have both matured enough by now that such black and white choices are now quite rare. ACTUAL MANUALS IN PHYSICAL RELEASES In today's day and age, even physical games in and of themselves are becoming less commonplace as digital media takes everything over- but back when physical media was at its peak, something else that went hand in hand with discs and cartridges of games was manuals. Actual, full-fledged, thick manuals, complete with instructions, information about controls, wonderful art and illustrations, and often even flavour text about the games' world, characters, and lore. That's a practice that is pretty much entirely non-existent now. Publishers just don't see the sense in investing that much time and money into crafting these full-fledged manuals and then printing them out on a large scale, especially not when they can sell those things as "special" goodies in costlier collectors editions of games.