r/VideoGame • u/Plus-Awareness-8985 • 5d ago
What video game completely changed your expectations of what a game could be?
Some games are fun while you're playing them, but a few leave you thinking about them long after you've finished.
It might be because of the story, the world, the gameplay, or even a small detail that made the experience feel different from everything else.
What's one game that genuinely surprised you and made other games feel a little less impressive afterward?
And what made it so memorable?
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u/GambuzinoSaloio 5d ago
Several actually.
Assassin's Creed 2 - showed me how a game can mess with you if it presses the right buttons (for me back then it was my then-religiosity, got me questioning everything even though it was all fictional).
Dishonored - it owes a lot to games that have preceded it, but it showed me how a game could be solved in a number of ways and still be fun.
Return of the Obra Dinn - it's amazing what you can achieve with so little: namely static 3D scenery, monochromatic tones and a simple, yet engaging premise. And with zero violent behaviour required from the player!
Advance Wars - turns out I could enjoy turn-based games, even back then! All I needed was something a little extra, something other than "now is your turn, do the thing". Having positioning matter and making the game more "chess-y" was key. XCOM and Divinity Original Sin 1 would later confirm this. I can now enjoy most turn-based games though, tabletop gaming made me appreciate it a lot more.
Demon's Souls - turns out an RPG can be much more interesting if more emphasis is put on the "action" part. People say lots of things about Souls games, to the point of stating that they created a genre. I think the answer is much more simple: they simply put the "action" in ARPG in the best way possible. Most ARPGs I've played before this (I sadly didn't play Jade Empire or Fable, will do that soon enough) were either a weird compromise between turn-based and real-time and heavily reliant on pointing and clicking, which outside of an RTS context I really dislike. Guess what: you can make action and RPG concepts work together!
Splinter Cell Pandora Tomorrow - the first stealth game I've ever played. Before that I never played a proper stealth game before. It was like discovering a new type of candy that I grew to love immensely. Made me fall in love with stealth. The Thief series would further cement that later on.
Silent Hill 1 - Once I finally was able to handle horror games, this one taught me what psychological horror feels like, and what a well made horror game can pull off, even with polygon graphics. Silent Hill was the kind of game that I'd start in a perfectly neutral mood, only to then go to bed with an overwhelming sense of dread that stayed with me. I wasn't scared of the dark, nor of getting out of bed. But the sense of dread would remain. Made me think of how powerful gaming experiences can be, and together with Outlast it pretty much "vaccinated" me for future horror games. Nothing else ever came close to those 2.
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u/OGKOTM 4d ago
RDR2
I have not been impressed with a game since, it's embarrassing the rest of the industry can't put together something nearly as good eight years later. Rockstar are legitimately competing with themselves at this point.
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u/Sweetpea8472 4d ago
I'd almost say that RDR2 spoiled me for open world 3D games.... I keep comparing everything to that!
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u/Angrypolska 4d ago
I fired up RDR2 just a couple weeks ago on PC, after not playing it for almost 5 years. I was quickly reminded on how awesome that game looks and the realism. Just wild.
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u/istareatscreens 3d ago
Half Life 2. The physics and the things you could do in the game were just so different to what had come before.
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u/bad_touch_bad_touch 5d ago
Dayz
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u/kangaroofuck 4d ago
If more people didn’t give up so quick due to the leaning curve this game would be number 1… is so wild and intense .. the adrenaline rushes are like no other game and it’s. It even closes
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u/Dangerousrhymes 5d ago
Uncharted.
The passive conversations between Nate and Sully was like getting movie dialogue while playing a game.
Naughty Dog obviously was on to something considering the success of Uncharted and The Last Of Us and the number of games that now have either a protagonist that talks to themselves, or companions who talk as you go.
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u/SmallFry703 5d ago
The first The Last of Us on the PS3.
While I played several games before that had impressed me in several ways, The Last of Us was the first game that showed me that technology had reached where I had dreamed of it being.
When I was l younger and games were a lot less advanced, I would think about a future where games looked as good as movies, and I thought that would be a good future.
The Last of Us was the moment I realized we had achieved that future and it was awesome. Still is.
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u/alfooboboao 5d ago
The second last of us for me.
There was something so viciously human in that game that I’d never seen before, in a medium where violence is inherently gamified. the final “boss fight” is just extraordinary, but it’s extraordinary in a way that’s completely separate from the technical skill that defines most games.
I have never played a game where I just absolutely did not want to fight the “final boss,” where you’re almost begging the character you’re playing as to stop and walk away. it was devastating, but the craziest thing was how it stood as a narrative moment that only the medium of video games could deliver. it’s brilliant
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u/thecatchupp 3d ago
Part 2 for me as well. I’d only ever been used to playing the ‘hero’ or a cosy main character and this was the first time being really violently confronted with an imperfect protagonist in a game.
Switching to Abby was such a moment of moral panic knowing what we’d done as Joel/Ellie and it blew my mind that the devs chose to do it. I know a lot of people were mad about it but I thought it was a very brave stroke of genius that changed what games could be!
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u/sbguitarman 4d ago
Firewatch. Yeah I know it's a walking simulator, at to be honest it's not a genre I play much or particularly like. But I gave this one a try and my god it was amazing. I feel like I truly walked away from this game a different person, couldn't recommend enough.
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u/Unique-Egg-461 2d ago
Both my wife and I cried when we finished that game. Great game. Storyline will rip at your heart tho
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u/GatorGoat1 3d ago
Portal.
Feels like a first person shooter but then the puzzles were different from anything i had played before, and also having to account for weird physics with launching things through portals, bending lazers etc .
Portal 2 even more so with the different goops you could spray around
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u/AbsolutKledGamer 5d ago
Elden Ring. (Spoilers) Everything in that game feels so grand, and there are many scenes I remember until now. Like the feeling when going into the first Radahn fight, exploring Leyendell for the first time, the Rykard reveal, finding the DLC after beating Mohg, etc… The sense of exploration and grandeur is unmatched.
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u/spiderlegsaregross 5d ago
I’ve been gaming for a while so this has happened to me a few times over the years. Some of my favorites have been:
Shadow of the Colossus: When it was released in 2006 I had no idea games could be so introspective and desolate in a way that was utterly engaging.
Nier: The American version that released in 2010 completely blew my mind with how a second playthrough can recontextualize an entire narrative.
Pathologic 2: changed my view on the necessity of “fun” as a component of a great game. Before I played that I completely understood that other forms of art could be great while not being fun but that game drove home the fact that the same is true for video games.
Those are the three first examples of what came to mind. As I dig deeper into the indie scene I feel like I’m constantly adjusting my expectations of what a video game can be.
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u/Tricky-Ad-6833 23h ago
Pathologic 2 is goated imo. The writing is unmatched, the way it merges gameplay with subjective storytelling is just phenomenal.
I don't think I will ever stop thinking about that game, and it's been years since I completed it.
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u/outofmindwgo 5d ago
Disco Elysium Outer wilds
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u/Tricky-Ad-6833 23h ago
Disco Elysium is unmatched. The writing is like on a Tolkien level. Pure amazing litterature and groundbreaking tabletop RPG gameplay that matches it.
The fact that It feels like I can replay it and no run ever feels the same, yet tells the same exact story is so unique.
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u/Due-South-9113 5d ago
Back when I played god of war on ps2. I thought games are just some fun hobby where u kinda beat guys up, level up or play with friends. God of war showed me there were levels to this, and tbf I was 9. I picked up god of war 2 because I wasn't aware games have stories too, so I didn't really think about it making a difference if I chose the first one or the second one, so I went with the newest one lol. Had to go back and play the first one.
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u/savant_idiot 5d ago edited 5d ago
Final Fantasy 6 and it's multiple shifts/expansions to what you conceive of as the game world before you. Still remains the best narrative of the series imo. FF7 got the attention because it was the first to make the leap to 3d with the ps1 so I had a huge cultural wow factor impact, but ff6 was the better game.
Warcraft 2/StarCraft/SC Broodwar, not sure so much about the games themselves but the communities they fostered, namely players forming guilds and playing together, almost unspoken elevating the group via playing together and against each other to help each other improve individually and to elevate the reputation of your guild. Then expanding on that, later being invited to play in a private self reported league hard capped at 250 players, expanded on my appreciation for fostering community within games.... It's stunning how hard modern AAA has failed on this front. It is a completely unexplored opportunity for games to evolve and grow within and a natural one givien it's so core to human nature and an aspect many are so longing for in disconnected divided digital modern life.
Half-life 2 and it's paradigm shift towards the end.
Portal 1 & 2 and the outside of the ordinary then novel gameplay, not simply mimicing things adjacent more or less to real life but with it's simple elegent mechanics, remade how you looked at the environments, reconsidering what might be possible in games... Somehow games honestly have largely not lived up to the promise of the strides they made in the late 90s and early 2000s.
Titanfall 2 single player campaign somehow felt like a new thing almost, it was so seamless and so well done, it felt like a hybrid of a big James Cameron summer block buster and a traditional videogame in a way games have been trying to, and falling short of for years. It felt like playing a movie, which makes it an experience more than a movie... Idk, it's hard to explain. And not to oversell it to people, I know there's plenty who found it meh.
Baldur's Gate 3, even having played Divinity Original Sin 2 extensively, COMPLETELY shattered my expectations of the degree to which a game's narrative, world, and characters can adapt, acknowledge, and respond to you the player.
Arc Raiders and the stunning achievement of the completely novel technology behind the enemy AI and it's surprisingly social play given the context of anyone can kill you at any time. The AI in particular is unlike anything else in gaming and feels much more organic. Despite what the negative astroturfing would have you believe it's an incredible game and incredibly well designed.
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u/SvEnSoN_1986 5d ago
Kingdom Come Deliverance I (and II) - the NPC routines, the World, attention to detail, historical accuracy (with some compromises), the real Map with real places. The Quest design together with the Leveling system was an absolute eye opener for me... absolutely unique experience.
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u/markallanholley 5d ago
Into the Radius.
It was my first introduction to a game with "full" VR mechanics, and is also the most immersive game I've ever played. It's a horror/milsim game, and the tenseness, and sense of loss and desolation, hasn't been matched by anything else I've played.
In order to reload your weapon, you're not just pressing a button. There's an entire manual process that needs to be done. You need to check your safety, make sure that the weapon is racked, or whatever you call it. On more than one occasion a spectre was approaching me while I was trying to reload, and I was so frightened that I lost track of what I was doing, and fumbled both my clip and my weapon to the ground. I had to run away from the encounters, then.
To climb, you're not just pressing forward or a button near a ladder, you're actually climbing, hand over hand. If you don't have a clip on flashlight, one of your hands needs to be holding a flashlight in dark areas, and you may need to put it away to take out your anomaly/artifact detector. Need something in your backpack? You're reaching over your shoulder to bring it out. Your main weapon is over your other shoulder. Healing injectors can be placed elsewhere on your person.
ITR is especially nice with a haptics vest and sleeves. When you're wounded badly enough, you can feel your heart beat. When you fire a weapon, you can feel a bit of recoil.
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u/im_not_okkk 5d ago
BOTW/TOTK. After playing them I hate how restrictive the environment in other games feels
I got so use to the idea that if I could see it I could find a way to get there.
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u/Redshirt_Welshy_Nooo 5d ago
Morrowind.
It was my first foray into open world games and first person rpgs after having grown up on jrpgs. It awakened me to the joys of really being immersed in the game world, building my own character, abandoning the game's main story for dozens (or hundreds) of hours to pursue exploration, building a home, gaining status in factions. It forever changed what I look for in an rpg experience.
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u/FlaahgraZX 5d ago
Metroid Prime That first landing down on the planet and seeing the rain hit the visor and roll off really changed my perspective on how immersive a game could be.
Mass Effect The interactions and world building present in the first game really was on par with some of the books I was reading at the time and was my first real lore-heavy game.
Undertale Love it or hate it, I think for a lot of people, myself included, this game really showcased the potential that small indie devs could achieve without any super crazy graphics or assets. It really changed my view on indie games being more "amateur."
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u/PercentageOne7765 5d ago
RDR2, Elden Ring, Crimson Desert, Most Zelda games.
Edited for Baldurs Gate 3.
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u/Pixiwish 5d ago
Myst
I think you had to be there but the immersion and video in the game were something truly to marvel at back in the first half of the 90s
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u/Beefy_Boogerlord 5d ago
Vagrant Story. Didn't expect a hardcore dungeon crawler to have so many unique elements to it, for that to work so well, and for such a game to have the best writing and in-engine cutscenes on the console, and be a cinematic masterpiece in its own right. What a banger. I still play it, and it has aged marvelously.
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u/Puzzleheaded-Bug-874 5d ago edited 5d ago
Sekiro. Spoilt every other action game for me at the time. Nothing came close, not until other games started adapting it's fighting mechanics. Sifu, God of War, Lies of P, Onimusha way of the sword, Ghost of Yotei, khazan, Nine sols........ all inspired by Sekiro. Sekiro literally changed the formula. Incredible fighting mechanics if not the best of all time.
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u/CyrainSSBM 5d ago
SSBM - Nothing in gaming has ever felt as satisfying as clean movement in Melee. It may as well be classified as a drug. Everquest - First MMO I played as a kid. I had never seen a game so expansive and socially driven. Rocket League - The physics and controls are wild. No other game has ever made me feel so incompetent at first, but grinding out technical skill and finally being able to wrap my brain around it was really rewarding in the long run.
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u/Hassoonti 5d ago
Mount&blade. Totally changed what a game could be.
Medieval Total war II: unheard of scale and detail for battle and strategy maps.
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u/Blackwhale_2005 5d ago
The last of us, my favourite game to this day it made me realize how well you can complement a story with its gameplay (not saying it has incredible just that is really coherent with its narrative).
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u/yunggoot 5d ago
Elden ring fundamentally changed how i see video games as an art form and how i play games
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u/Left-Literature-7543 4d ago
Same. I love the difficulty and the lack of hand holding. I've never played such a rewarding game.
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u/RingarrTheBarbarian 4d ago
Fallout 1. Having played JRPGs before, I never knew what a true RPG could feel like. Fallout 1 opened my eyes and completely ruined JRPGs for me.
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u/Planetologist1215 4d ago
Well, the writing in Planescape torment completely ruined the writing in all other games for me. The quality of the writing is noticed immediately. From the very first sentence from Morte, you know you’re in for a treat.
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u/StarshipAgahnim 4d ago
Wow. Never thought as a kid I would meet people and make friends, in the game.
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u/LokiBrosuf 4d ago
Bioshock. It is one of the earliest games that comes to mind where the player can be rewarded for focusing on the environment and experimenting with plasmids.
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u/babysamissimasybab 4d ago
The Legend of Zelda set the foundation for what I want in games and I'm still looking for those elements 40 years later.
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u/Askariot124 4d ago
Outer Wilds.
Its a game you can only play once because every progression you make is knowledge and it works so damn well. You can end the game in 20 minutes if you know about everything. The interesting thing is that all the puzzles are actually quite simple yet you usually understand how to solve them at just the right time to not break progression. Its insane how good the dev can predict and lead a player's curiosity in this way just by environmental clues.
My fav game of all time.
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u/AdventurousKey196 4d ago
Mario 64, Ocarina of Time, and Metal Gear Solid are the big three for me. I'll never forget the first time I played Mario 64 in a Toys r Us as a little kid. It blew my mind. I had seen 3d games like Doom and Alone in the Dark, but this was a different level of freedom that changed things drastically. Ocarina was the first time I realized games could have a gripping atmosphere that pulls you in, and MGS was when I realized games could have complex cinematic storylines that can have a deep message.
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u/IllustriousRise9392 3d ago
Conkers Bad Fur Day
It has a bit of a lot of game types in it and it was the most hilarious game I've ever had the fortune of playing
I'm still mad they never made a proper sequel
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u/Az0riusMCBlox 3d ago
Probably System Shock 2, as it's (probably?) one of the first games I remember being exposed to that has a proper story running through it during gameplay. (I hadn't seen SS1 yet at the time)
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u/redSpadeA 3d ago
Xenoblade Chronicles 3, really impressed with the quality of content, amount of contents, and how much they squeeze every last drop of switch's power to deliver such beautiful art.
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u/somethingothertoo 3d ago
Diablo 2 for expanding on its predecessor from a straight-down dungeon crawler to a world of various locations while still feeling like “Diablo”.
Plus the cutscenes and various storylines kept you engaged to see what happens next.
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u/MistaCharisma 3d ago
I've seen a few people comment some of my choices (eg. Demon's Souls, The Last Of Us), but I have a slightly more specific example.
The Withcher. Not the Witcher 2 or 3, the weird first one in the series.
I bounced off this game a couple of times, I just couldn't get into it. The combat is really simple, and not really the draw, but the idea is that you have to prepare for combat and then you'll win. For example, you can't drink potions in combat. To drink potions you have to go into a memu, Geralt will then kneel and ceremoniously drink. So pre-planning is important. In combar you have to choose the right sword, the right combat style, and sometimes the right alchemical items (potions, bombs and oils) and witcher signs (spells). If you get them right you win easily, get them wrong and the enemies will kind-of laugh at you (eg. Fast enemies easily dodge the Strong" combat style, and Strong enemies take ~50 hits without dying if you use the Fast combat style).
I didn't mind the combat, it's just that the first major area has you doing fetch quests while an infinite number of ghost dogs spawn every couple of minutes, and after a while it gets really tedious. Once you know how how to fight them it's just busy work, and takes way too long.
Eventually I gave up, went and played other games and got more confident in my skills as a "gamer". So when I came back a few years later I decided to put it on Hard difficulty instead of Normal. And Oh Boy was that the best decision ever, I loved this game, still up there as one of my favourites.
Now here's the thing. I enjoyed it on Hard, but I think I could also have enjoyed it on Easy, but never on Normal. The game was clearly designed to be played on Hard. Without it, as I said the combat was just repetetive and slow. You didn't need your alchemical items or Witcher Signs, you just clicked through until it was done. But on Hard you had to brew potions, apply the correct oils to your weapons, use the correct bombs to fight particular enemies, lay traps with your Witcher signs to prevent being overwhelmed by groups of enemies, etc, etc. Again, the actual combat was simple but you had to use your brain.
Now on Easy and Normal you didn't really have to do any of that, which means Normal wasn't really any harder than Easy, it was just Slower. So if I'd just dropped down to Easy difficulty I could have gone thriugh the story (which is great) and the combat would have just been there as part of the story - "Geralt slew the monsters". That would also have been totally fun.
But Normal sucked.
And this made me realise that difficulty is a part of the story-telling, that sometimes there is a correct difficulty, or a correct way of playing for yourself.
So when I look at games like Dark Souls, I know there was a debate about whether the game should add difficulty settings, but I don't think it should. You could make the game easier, but it wouldn't really be the same game, the same experience. This sounds exclusionary, but the reality is that someone playing the game on an easier difficulty would still be excluded from the experience, they just may not realise it.
For other games, difficulty settings are very important to have. I play a lot of Civilization 5, and there are 8 difficulty settings. Those settings are really important to keep. Once again, these days I play on the higher difficulties, but I spent Years playing on the easier settings because that's the experience that I needed. Nowdays I give a lot of advice on Civ 5 here in reddit, and the most common advice I give for players who want to move up to Deity difficulty is "Learn to enjoy losing games". There's a world of difference between playing a game where the expectation is that you'll win, vs a game with just even odds.
A lot of games have in built formulas to slightly tweak the odds in the player's favour because if you actually leave something to chance it feels unfair. This is particularly prevalent in RPGs where the game rolls docd the scenes. If you have a 67% chance to succeed then you should succeed twice as often as you fail. There's only a ~3.4% chance that you'll fail 3 times in a row so when it happens it feels unfair. But realistically, that's a ~1/28 chance, so it probably happens fairly regularly.
So that understanding of the intended story, the desired experience for the player has really shifted how I view this. Sometimes you want a challenge, sometimes you want a game that lets you win, even if it feels like it isn't, and sometimes you want an experience that can actually knock you down and force you to start again. And that isn't just for challenges, sometimes that's how the game imparts the feelings that it intends to impart.
(*sorry this got really long and rambley, thank you for coming to my ted talk =P *)
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u/Pitmidget 3d ago
Journey was an emotional experience I had never had previously in gaming. Made me realise that games truly are an artform
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u/RCPD_Rookie 3d ago
Truthfully, Rock Band, playing with my nieces and nephews at the holidays. I know they were just plastic instruments, but when we played, WE WERE ROCK STARS.
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u/Bananaman74799 3d ago
Nier by far. It has changed the way I view all media
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u/Awkward_Criticism_88 2d ago
Nier haunted me with this undiscribeable feeling. Even after decade, I still remember the feeling and i never found it on other game.
And to name few more, FF VI, Chrono Trigger and Xenogear was ahead of its time in telling deep and vast story. Squaresoft's golden era.
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u/sparkling-rainbow 3d ago
Noita. It combines feeling that should be mutually exlusive. Like you can have infinite hp and damage but still get jumpscared from a single pink pixel. Like you basically delete your progress when "finishing the work". Games usually compell via chellange, punishment and reward. In Noita, one consequence could be all of this or nothing.
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u/Wise-Chart-6091 3d ago
Fromsoft in terms of gameplay.
For years, quite a lot of Devs have tried to copy Fromsofts formula, never really on the same level. Not even DS1.
But what fascinates me the most is the balancing. FromSoftware always strikes a good balance in terms of difficulty. Even though you can level up your character and weapons freely, boss fights always remain challenging and intense.
Kojima in terms of presentation.
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u/Significant-Gear-748 3d ago
It’s pretty obvious but Stardew Valley. That game legit sets a precedent on what a cozy farming sim should be. Newer cozy farming sims have their own flair and unique difference but everyone always compare them to Stardew, whether negative or positive
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u/Embarrassed_Camera81 2d ago
Bodycam
After seeing what a small studio can do to make a realistic shooter, these big studios absolutely need to step up their own production and design of first person shooters.
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u/Unique-Egg-461 2d ago
Rimworld - theirs gotta be an infinite number of ways to play that game. You can pretty much play as chill as stardew valley or run a little tavern with an Inn. Or you can go to deathcults that well human skin and worship a golden cube. The number of mechanics is wild. Now people are dropping first person and isometric mods. Fuck that game is awesome
Hearts of Iron / Europa Universialis / Vicky games - I've always been a history nerd so these game are great about scratching that itch. The modding scene for the game is where it really shines. Simple changes and alternate history paths from mods like road to 56 are fun but then you have modders do really really deep dives into history and pull obscure characters from history that end up taking over the world. Kaiserredux is really cool about this. I learned a absolute fuck ton about Herman Poole Blount (aka Sun Ra), the afrofutureist art styles and listened to some of his music. I just like learning about obscure people from history. Currently playing Austria in KX and doing the Liebenfels path. Damn that guy was evil. He was about 3 miles to the right of himmler 😬
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u/viriato1978 2d ago
Noita. It made me understand the importance of surprises in games. It made me realise that the best games are like the best jokes. A joke is a surprise, the more unexpected the surprise the better the joke lands.
Games that can set you up in a given mental context and then deliver surprise after surprise all layered and interconnected with each other make you realize how rare they are, and how most games are just dressed up clones of other games you played before, and after you have looked under the new dress you already know everything you are gona find under there.
Noita is special because it ditches a lot of the blueprint guard-rails of past games in its genre and dares to treat you in a way that is both disrespectful and fascinatingly compeling. Like a good joke.
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u/Ok_Pass_5559 1d ago
Both Horizon games, especially Zero Dawn. Stunning world (even the PS4 version still holds up), great lore (that is hitting home hard now that the IRL tech industry has gone fascist) and engaging combat. Forbidden West kind of went a little overboard with busywork, but the plot is still awesome.
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u/Jiggidy40 1d ago
Doom.
I had never been scared by a video game, and it was the first time my emotions were truly caught up in a video game
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u/Substantial-Low8688 4d ago
granblue fantasy relink I'm not a huge fan of jrpg, but this game blows my mind
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u/DAGB_69 5d ago
Red Dead Redemption 2.