10 Video Games That Blew Your Mind (Without You Realising)
Tears of the Kingdom is more than Legend Of Zelda: Korok War Crime Simulator.
Game development is one of those skills that gets more interesting the more you learn about it. The whole thing seems utterly impenetrable from the outside, but once you start scratching the surface, it can appear almost like magic.
Much like special effects in film, the best gaming innovations should feel so natural you won't even notice that what just happened was revolutionary and mind-blowing.
Usually, some small detail in how the character moves or how you interact with the world, or even one tiny graphical detail YOU don't even give a second thought, will send other game devs throughout the industry frothing at the mouth because "They can DO that? I didn't know they could do that!"
And these small, inconsequential details will go on to fuel the biggest innovations across the industry for the next several years. So, in tribute to these low-key legends, here are the 10 games that revolutionized the entire industry, in ways so small and innocuous, you never even noticed until someone much smarter than you pointed it out.
10. Red Faction: Guerrilla
Making a game where you can destroy everything in sight sounds simple enough. Just have all the structures in the game be made out of balsa wood, Styrofoam, and the hopes and dreams of DC fans. But accounting for how the physics engine will react to that destruction is a complicated process, which is why most games just don't bother.
Red Faction has always boasted destructible environments, even if the first two games failed to really implement them effectively. But Guerrilla, the long-awaited sequel by Saints Row developer Volition, took the idea and ran with it, making the GTA game that we all really wanted: one where you can lay waste to literally everything around you.
This was done by upgrading the revolutionary Geo-Mod engine used in the original games into the Geo-Mod 2.0 engine. This engine provided a "stress-based" collapse model for buildings. Ensuring that every building would have weight and mass to it, so that the player has to put in that extra bit of work to get a building to come down.