The Biggest Innovations in Gaming

 

 

 

Inside the core of all great videogames ever made, there are multiple inventive gameplay mechanics working their magic. And this article is about celebrating the most groundbreaking and influential gameplay mechanics that have, by virtue of their sheer ingenuity, also made way to an incredibly wide range of videogames. Ever since their debut, these 4 gameplay features have been adapted and implemented in so many different titles throughout the years that they’ve slowly carved their own footprints in videogame history, to the point that right now it's difficult to even imagine videogames without them.

 

 

4. Dynamic Cover: Before Gears of War introduced it’s Dynamic Cover system that allowed players to seamlessly move and position themselves in firefights without getting hit, there wasn’t much in terms of cover mechanism in both the first and third person shooter genres. They relied mostly on the good ol’ run-n-gun shooting and any element of cover was basically only to escape the enemies’ line-of-sights by getting behind in-game objects. There wasn’t any tactical element to taking cover and the ensuing gameplay almost always came down to how early you could shoot as opposed to your foes.

2006’s Gears of War changed all that with a fully fleshed cover system that combined both the offensive and defensive elements of a shooter while also bringing a whole new element of strategy in the play—allowing the players to not only easily move and shoot between covers but now they could actually plan out their course of action while taking cover, which resulted in some gloriously satisfying gameplay in the midst of heated gunfights.

Besides bringing the experience a lot closer to real life, the Dynamic Cover system completely elevated which was earlier a rather generic shooting experience to something that’s a lot more tactical and engaging, as now firefights can have much more depth and replayability to them.

And now, ALL shooters, both first and third persons, have the same Dynamic Cover system as their de-facto gameplay element, and it actually seems quite impossible to think that it wasn't always the case. That's how integral this feature has become to modern videogames. 

3. Inter-Game Continuity: One of the biggest leaps in gaming was the story-based continuity from entirely different games which was previously almost impossible to imagine. The Mass Effect trilogy is one of the best examples of this inter-game continuity where the consequences of the choices that you had made in a previous game completely carried over to the next one—creating an almost organic and believable sense of realism in games that was unlike anything else. It also allows videogames to reach a level of interactive storytelling that’s simply not possible in ANY other medium.

While playing Azrael’s mission in Batman: Arkham Knight, it suddenly struck me that the lurking mystery that Azrael was throughout Batman: Arkham City, the previous title in the series, is now actually being uncovered in this game, that was an epiphany of a moment which made me pause and reflect on how far gaming has truly come. The sheer popularity of this feature (as it's present in most games that you see today) can't obscure the fact that how much of a colossal advancement this has brought to videogame storytelling. When you actually think of how videogame narratives worked in the games from the past decade, the inter-game continuity feels nothing short of revolutionary. 

2. The Combination of Open World and RPG: The RPG elements themselves add a significantly greater replayability to virtually any game, but when you add a fully explorable open world on top of it, the playability just goes through the roof. It's this sky high replayability that makes the player come back to the experience over and over again as now there’s a nigh-unlimited amount of gameplay possibilities available. That’s why almost all RPG’s today have an Open World in them, while earlier they mostly relied on their core role playing elements and storytelling.

A great example is the Dragon Age series, which went from classic RPG driven experiences in the first two games to a full blown Open World RPG in it’s third installment. The Mass Effect series also took a similar route in their 4^th game, and the main reason for this sharp transition in genres is that the combination of Role Playing mechanics and Open World allows the developers to maximize the gameplay as much as possible. Besides, these two elements also fit together like hand in glove and make the resulting experience a lot richer than what would’ve been possible in any other way.

I believe the pioneers of this Open World-RPG blend is none other than Bethesda (I could be wrong, though) as The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion (which came out back in 2006) was the first ever title where I experienced this particularly rich flavour of gameplay which was later refined to perfection with entries in both the Fallout series and The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim. All of these titles provide virtually unlimited hours of gameplay, courtesy of this delicious mix of genres.

The Open World + RPG formula has became so insanely popular (for all the right reasons) that today nearly all RPG’s have an Open World and all Open World titles have at least some amount of RPG elements integrated into them. Which makes this particular blend of genres easily the most widely implemented innovation in all of gaming.

1. Freeflow Combat: The Third person action genre was the only area where the Consoles had a sort of permanent edge over the PC, cause of the inherent limitations of the Keyboard-Mouse combo where the larger surface area of the Keyboard makes quick successions of multiple keystrokes downright impossible to pull off. And that’s why although the Keyboard Mouse combo had always been the undisputed champion when it came to FPS’, they struggled to a limp in third person action titles and fighting games where it seemed that the keyboard could never match up to the tactility that the analogue controllers offer.  

Enter Batman Arkham Asylum in 2009 that debuted the Freeflow Combat system which mapped the Keyboard-Mouse combo with complexly chained animations to deliver a third person action experience that could actually match up to the console titles in terms of both range of movements and fluidity of control.

  

With a huge variety of richly detailed and meticulously choreographed animation sequences practically tailor made to work on just the quick clicks of the mouse and a few really simple keystrokes, the Freeflow Combat system brought the deep and intuitive action experience earlier only possible on the consoles to the much simpler layout of the Keyboard-Mouse combo. And thereby finally filled the void which was there in the PC platform for the longest time.

Striking a sweet balance between accessibility and depth, the easy-to-grasp-but-hard-to-master Freeflow combat was a revolution in every sense, and that’s why from the Assassin’s Creed series of games to most third person action titles released in the past 12 years (also including the highly acclaimed Spider Man PS4), you’ll find the Freeflow Combat system working under-their-hoods. Not only did it remove a longstanding limitation in the PC platform (and made it look easy), it carved a legacy of it’s own in videogame history in a fairly short time span with a massively broad range of applications. And for that, the Freeflow Combat more than deserves to be ranked as one of the greatest gameplay innovations in all of Videogame history.

And with that, this list comes to it’s close. Let me know if you agree with all this or not in the comments section. Happy Gaming.