The Outer Worlds has a mechanic where instead of your companions having their own inventories, their carrying capacity just adds to yours. This way you can carry more stuff with a larger party without having to constantly back and forth swap over items.
In any game that involves going around and picking up lots of shit, inventory management really needs to be as painless as possible
Torchlight 2 had pets that, on command, would carry inventory to town to sell for you. You could also order healing potions. So good, and cut down on 90% of the back-and-forth. Their time away increased as you went deeper into the wild, and they also helped in combat, giving risk/reward.
Credit where it's due, Torchlight lifted the pet system straight out of FATE, a diablo-clone series from wildtangent.
If someone could design a game using the Nemesis system from shadow of war in a more engaging way within a story it'd probably be a hit lol
In the rhythm game scene at least, Konami is as close as you're gonna get to AAA, so fuck it, we're going with that. The scoring system used in DDR is absolutely, by far, the best in any rhythm game, and more games need to adopt it. By which I mean every single rhythm game should use it.
There's 5 timings - Marvellous, Perfect, Great, Good, and Miss. Marvellous is frame-perfect, +/-17 milliseconds. Perfect is 18-33ms, Great is 34-108ms, Good is 109-158ms, everything after that is a miss.
An absolutely flawless run, all-Marvellous, is exactly 1,000,000 points. Doesn't matter how many notes there are in the song, each note is just worth a fraction of 1 million. A Perfect is 10 less points than Marvellous, Great is 60% of the value, and Good is 20%. With this scoring system, combos mean nothing, which is good, whoever thought combo-based scoring is good is just wrong, any system where the one on the left is worse is garbage. That, and with a quick glance at a score, you can instantly tell how well they did - a 999,750 on Endymion - Expert? All-Marvellous with 25 Perfects. Yeah, once you start mixing in Greats and Goods, it gets a bit more murky, but also, if you're still hitting Greats on a song, your score probably isn't "relevant" unless it's like, Lachryma - Challenge.
So much nicer than other rhythm games. Sound Voltex uses the same "capped" scoring, with a perfect being 10,000,000 in that game - but a Near is just 50% of a Perfect, so like, a score of 9,998,740 is... probably just one Near, I think...? Or IIDX, where there is no cap, and it's just "perfects are 2 points, greats are 1". Is a score of 1800 good? Maybe! It could be a flawless run on a 900-note song, or a really shit run on a song with 3000 notes! Who knows!
DDR's scoring is just flawless, though.
and if you actually like the scoring system in games with a combo-based system, please reconsider
so much better than guitar hero lol, I still don't know how the fuck it works and I've pretty much only played clone hero for the past few months
GH/CH is combo-based, but only pretty loosely. Notes are worth 50 points baseline, a 2-note chord is 100 points, 3-note 150, etc. Hold notes are 25 points per beat. Hit 10 notes in a row to raise your combo multiplier by one, up to 4x (so 0-10 note combo is 1x, 11-20 is 2x, etc). Activating star power doubles your multiplier temporarily.
Each song has it's "base score", which is just "number of notes * 50" - basically if you hit every note, but intentionally overstrummed to break your combo between each one. A 3-star requires the base score. 4-star is 2x base, 5-star is 2.7x, 6-star is 3.6x, and 7-star is 4.4x.
It's a pretty straight-forward system, just not explained well anywhere.
It's gonna sound dumb but polish. Most AAA games these days just have so much polish. Spend time to fix bugs and get things right. Spend time on the little details that make a world feel alive. It's harder. It's probably not worth it. But it really makes a difference
I unironically like old assassins creed. The gameplay loop isn't too challenging and it's meditative, you just slip into it and immerse yourself in the world. THe combat is fluid. I like wandering around looking at landmarks while collecting things. The newer games are great, but they lost something with the Souls-lite combat style.
Anno 1404 has the best UI I've ever used. So swish, so responsive, so when-you-want-it. The upcoming Paralives UI looks really good too.
As for mechanics, I like difficulty rules unpacked. So have Easy/Normie/Hard, but give say fast travel, hunger, & companion death checkboxes (for say an RPG). Also players should be able to change them on-the-fly, not just at game start. Only ever seen this with Minecraft's /gamerule
Oh and I liked Pandemic's Battlefront hop-in-any vehicle attitude. And multi-player vehicles. Maybe Halo had that too? Modern games tend to put up speedbumps or paywalls.
Morrowind's enchanting was dope. Oblivion's spellmaking was dope.
Racing games where you can just turn around, race backwards, and smack the approaching field head-on are a laugh. Burnout 2 did the risk/reward really well with dangerous driving for boost. 3 cheapened it with arcadey targets, but that game was rated by the fanbase, so what do I know.
Dragon Age 2 had a great combo system with primers and detonaters. I liked the carry-over into ME 3. Didn't really work in ME 2 with shields everywhere; didn't really knit together in DA 1, and DA 3 was just weak.
Taking control of individuals in Bullfrog games was always a laugh. Theme Park or Dungeon Keeper.
Time pressure on decisions! If you're playing a story game, the NPC shouldn't just gawk at you. I think Life is Strange did this. Could be a difficulty/accessability setting.
I'll stop now.
As for mechanics, I like difficulty rules unpacked. So have Easy/Normie/Hard, but give say fast travel, hunger, & companion death checkboxes (for say an RPG). Also players should be able to change them on-the-fly, not just at game start. Only ever seen this with Minecraft’s /gamerule
my favourite game for this is silent hunter 3
depending on how you set the individual realism settings it can be an arcadey "sail about and blow shit up" game, or an incredibly tense full on simulation and anywhere in between
I honestly hate the daily quests. Mostly because they feel like a chore and if you're playing about 2-3 games, it eats up a significant amount of time. I partially blame that on the Season Pass system, though.
I will say that save scum avoidance in Disco Elysium was fun to see.
A lot of co op games usually just have you do the same thing, but others require you to use your strengths to progress.
Game Maker's Toolkit made an excellent video about symmetric and asymmetric co-op that I think is what you're talking about. I've never played it, but the focus of the video is on a game called Overcooked.
Man this question is depressing.
I'm looking through steam, and I can't think of a single noteworthy mechanic in any of the recent AAA games in my library. All of them are just the normal industry trends to various levels of polish. But then there are indie games:
Noita (action roguelike)
The game world is a gigantic Powder Toy full of secrets, and your offensive wands are insanely customizable with lots of interactions. The huge array of choices and focus on preparation makes it the only action game I've played that gives me the same feeling as Nethack.Everspace (space sim rogue-lite)
The story integration over multiple permadeath runs is neat, and after your first win, it gives you extra goals and an actual in-game reason to do more runs.From the Depths (naval construction thingy? Like Kerbal but battleships)
Just the absolute dedication to complexity as a goal. Weapons are made of multiple blocks, so you have to build a ship big enough to hold the size of weapon you want, and then you have to decide how to build the gun.Indie games can get away with taking one mechanic and making that the game, I guess. AAA not so much.
Phantasy Star for the Sega Genesis. A JRPG through and through, but had a setting in the turn based combat menu where you could set each character's move and the battle would keep running turns with those actions selected until you hit a button on the joypad or the battle ended. Then you'd be able to give each character a different action for their turn if you wanted.
Earthbound, JRPG. When you hit a certain number of levels above the monsters on the map, you auto win the fight.
Obviously, Shadowrun falls into the trap of having lots of tiny bonuses you have to remember, so you can’t win them all.
A D&D 5e -inspired fix: Instead of counting up a bunch of tiny bonuses, simply determine whether a character has "advantage" or "disadvantage" - if they have advantage, then they can reroll their 1s once to try and get more successes on their roll, if they have disadvantage, then they must reroll their 6s once and possibly end up with fewer.
Having played the shadowrun table-top, remembering the bonuses usually isn't a big deal because they don't vary situationally and you have the number of dice your character has for each skill written down on your character sheet, so you don't have to calculate a lot of finicky bonuses on the fly, only when you make the character and then adjust a number the 1-2 times a session something happens to permanently effect a characters capabilities. So if you're trying to plug dragon in the eye while jumping out of a helicopter, you roll the same number of dice as if you were shooting targets at a range, and that number is written down on your character sheet under "shooting things" the only difference is how high those have to roll for you to succeed.
The main problem I had with shadowrun was the whole "three worlds" thing. Street sams/infiltrators/riggers/faces/ etc are almost always in completely different locations and playing at different levels of time dilation than Deckers and, to a lesser extent mages, and often aren't even taking actions that immediately effect each other except in specifically contrived situations, so as a DM it's difficult to give more than 1-2 players screen time at once which often tends to lead to slower games and less engaged players. Love the world though, so it's often worth running, but there are bits of it that are not well thought out from a ttrpg perspective.
