Gaming Tropes There Should Be More Of

[Mister Jack]

Yes, now that you mention it I noticed that it was in RE4 too and I loved it.

[TheMightyEthan]

I'm not very familiar with RE4 (haven't played it since the OG Gamecube release and didn't even finish it then), but I agree being able to play enemies off each other is great. One of my favorite parts of Halo 2 is when the Covenant schism happens and you have the Elites and Grunts vs the Brutes and Jackals, and you're just running through High Charity while they blast the shit out of each other.

[Mister Jack]

Diablo IV has its issues, but one thing I like a lot is that unique side quest items will drop from enemies even if you haven't picked up the side quest yet. Your character won't know what it is, but when you run into the NPC who wants it you can just go "Oh hey it just so happens I already have one of those." It's a great little time saver.

[toxicitizen]

Playing a lot of Cyberpunk last month already had me thinking about this one a lot but playing Alan Wake II immediately after is only reinforcing how much I love this trope: having music composed for a fictional band within the game world. This music may or may not be done by an actual real-world band.

 

Cyberpunk has Refused standing in for Samurai and Remedy obviously has Poets of the fall for Old Gods of Asgard. And in both cases, I love the fictional band way more than the real one lol. I love that Remedy's connected universe thing is keeping Old Gods going throughout their various games. It's been almost a week since I've played the Herald of Darkness chapter in Alan Wake II and I still can't stop thinking about it lol. And I'm going to be genuinely bummed out if the Cyberpunk sequel doesn't come with new Samurai music.

 

So, I've been wondering if there are other examples of this. I know there's a (pretty good) full album for Star-Lord from the recent Eidos Guardians of the Galaxy game, although I don't think that one has a real-world counterpart. Can't really think of anything else, though.

[Mister Jack]

Custom difficulty settings. Palworld has easy, normal, and hard settings like any other game, but then it also has a custom setting where you can adjust sliders for practically everything. Look at this.

 

There are a ton of settings you can change, and this screenshot is only around half of them. Think grinding takes too long? Just speed it up yourself. Want to make the game harder? You can adjust that too. I didn't touch most of these settings, at least not yet, because I want to experience the intended difficulty first. However, I did adjust the penalty upon death to just dropping your items instead of dropping items and equipment and now I'm having a lot more fun with it (you can also set it to no penalty, but I didn't want to make it too easy on myself). 

[TheMightyEthan]

Yeah, Ubisoft games are really good about that too, usually letting you adjust overall difficulty level, or separately all kinds of stuff like player health, enemy health, player damage, enemy damage, etc etc.

[Mister Jack]

Enemies getting new attacks on harder difficulties. I went into a Silent Hill 2 run on hard mode and quickly discovered to my surprise that the starter enemies who spent the entirety of normal difficulty shambling slowly and vomiting in an arc were now charging me headfirst and vomiting in a direct line straight at my position. As you can imagine it has completely changed how I engage with them. I'm looking forward to seeing what tricks the other enemies have up their sleeves now.

[TheFlyingGerbil]

cool if it goes the other way too so on easy mode they stand around taking anti-emetics.

[Mister Jack]

This is VR specific but usually in a VR shooter that doesn't use a weapon wheel you'll have sidearms at your hips and one gun on your shoulder, maybe two shoulders if you're lucky. Metro Awakening gets around this by having all the two-handed holsters you need on your backpack, and you can access them depending on which shoulder you grab the backpack from. Grabbing your left shoulder gives you access to your filters and lighter and portable generator on the front of the pack. Grabbing your right shoulder turns it around so you can access all your guns hanging from the back side. It's a pretty nice compromise and you still have to reach for the weapon you want in real time so it's not like you can just break your immersion by rapidly hot swapping between them. I hope more VR shooters do something like this. I never really liked the Halo style restriction of only two guns at a time.

[Mister Jack]

Really appreciate that Indiana Jones makes the 4K textures an optional download. I really wish more games would separate things you don't need like language packs and 4K textures.

[TheMightyEthan]

Language packs I agree with, but the 4k textures thing annoys me. 4k is rapidly becoming the standard and I hate starting a game only to realize I need to do a separate download to get the textures to not look muddy.

 

*Edit - Though if they wanted to make it so that when you start the game download it automatically asks you if you want to also download the hi res textures or not then that would be good.

[Mister Jack]

I downloaded the game pass version and it was a box to check or uncheck when I did it.

[TheMightyEthan]

Okay then yeah that's good. The games I've had with a separate 4k pack don't tell you about it, you have to just find it yourself and download it as DLC.