10 Popular Video Game Mechanics The Industry ABANDONED

It's generally expected that whenever an inventive new video game mechanic rears its head, it's going to be imitated by all the competition until we're finally sick of it.

Yet sometimes, beloved mechanics end up going the way of the dodo long before we've had our fill, for one of a multitude of possible reasons.

And that's unfortunately the case with these awesome mechanics, each of which added something seriously memorable to their respective games and, in extreme cases, even proved quite literally industry-shaping. For a while, at least.

Despite these mechanics going down gangbusters with players, each was eventually ditched by developers en masse, enough that they're a depressing rarity in the modern gaming sphere.

The reasons for this are myriad and at times complex - perhaps the technical realities of modern games don't easily allow it, or it simply comes down to changing trends in the gaming industry. And then, most infuriatingly of all, there's good ol' fashioned publisher greed.

So many gamers would love to see these mechanics make a glorious resurgence, but let's be honest, you shouldn't count on it any time soon...

At the turn of the century, it truly seemed like destructible environments were going to be the next big thing in video games.

With Red Faction's innovative Geo-Mod mechanic allowing players to obliterate large swaths of the environment all the way back in 2001, it appeared that the floodgates had opened and environmental destruction would only become more complex and detailed in the years that followed.

Yet aside from a few notable examples - such as Battlefield: Bad Company - destructible environments quickly disappeared from the AAA sphere entirely.

Considering how popular open-world games are these days, it's a damn shame that destruction tech has basically come and gone.

Yet it's also worth noting the technical side of the equation. For starters, allowing players to deform the environment in a granular way is extremely resource-intensive, and in an era where modern games often struggle to hit a stable 60fps as it is, the performance-related risks speak for themselves.

Furthermore, there's the general game design issue, that it's difficult to create an immersive world if the player is then given carte blanche to level it all to the ground.

All the same, that this mechanic is largely absent from the modern AAA realm is a massive letdown given how much fun it's been in the past.