«

[Blood-Pigggy]

If there's one thing that consistently bothers me in the gaming industry, it's the fact that people always borrow the wrong ideas from each other. I can't count how many games have decided to utilize Halo's shield system, despite the fact that it's an absolutely atrocious mechanic that completely ruins the pacing of most shooters (lose your shields, hide behind a rock for ten seconds).

To get to the point, there are some great, fantastic, ideas that seem to have been forgotten, despite their potential to become quite prominent and save everyone a lot of trouble, or just in general present an improvement to existing formulae.

A few of the ones that I miss.

-Inexhaustible resources. This one is picking up (SupCom, CoH, DoW) but the games it's present in are typically utter garbage (SupCom, CoH, DoW). Spawned by Total Annihilation, it allowed the player the focus on the more important aspects of an RTS, namely combat and having to defend your resources instead of tediously searching out new sites.
The entire concept thrived on the idea of 'resource flow', essentially, you consistently created hordes of units, structures and your towers and big guns used up resources as they fired, because of this you were forced to develop a stable influx of resources. Since the more metal and energy you had allowed you to produce more units and structures, it was essential to keep the flow alive. This meant that the enemy could easily dust off a clump of metal collectors or energy structures and ruin your entire economy in the space of a second. It forced the player to perform both defensively and offensively since turtling meant that you couldn't expand your defenses as quickly as your enemy, and thus you'd be overrun by superior forces.
Too bad no one has done it right since, not even in TA's successor Kingdoms.

-Non-regenerating health. I don't just mean the CoD element of waiting for a red screen to fade, I mean that in general you don't recover health. This was seen in GoldenEye (for the N64), Perfect Dark, and Perfect Dark's infamous sequel Zero. While I don't want to see it in every single shooter, it worked perfectly for the style of gaming GoldenEye and Perfect Dark possessed, it forced the player to move carefully and excel in combat, since there's no way he would find a health pack. Occasionally you'd get some more armor to pad you up, but your health was precious and altered only in a negative manner. I'd prefer more games using this system in order to add an element of tension. It would be nice in a stealth game.


So the question is, what mechanics do you expect to see more of in the industry?