10 Ambitious Gameplay Ideas That Broke Everything
4. An Advanced Physics Engine - Jurassic Park: Trespasser
Jurassic Park: Trespasser may not be a game you know, but its influence in the gaming industry is undeniable.
The first-person shooter, developed by DreamWorks Interactive and released in 1998, operated on an extremely ahead-of-its-time game engine, capable of rendering large, expansive outdoor environments, never-before-seen ragdoll physics, and incredibly advanced dinosaur AI.
As a feat of engineering, Trespasser secured its place in the annals of gaming history immediately, and was cited by Valve's Gabe Newell as influencing Half-Life 2's ground-breaking physics work years later.
The problem, however, is that Trespasser was basically too advanced for most average gaming rigs to run the damn thing well.
And on top of that, as a game it's simply not very fun. So much time was spent developing state-of-the-art tech, and yet the core gameplay is awkward to control, filled with bugs, and painfully unintuitive.
It is as such a basically terrible game, but in its own way one that absolutely needed to exist for the tectonic leaps it made in game development.