8 Popular Video Game Mechanics That Suddenly Disappeared

It's not unfair to say that true innovation is tough to come by in the video game sphere, and considering how difficult it is to make even a basically competent game, that shouldn't be terribly surprising.

So it's always fun to see a game deliver a totally unique, outside-the-box mechanic that gives players something they never even knew they wanted. 

And typically, whenever a developer comes up with a creative feature for their game, it'll be listlessly borrowed - or, less charitably, ripped off - in a bevy of other titles.

What's more surprising, then, is when a popular mechanic enjoys its brief moment in the sun and then basically just... disappears. 

It's absolutely expected that a neato gameplay flourish will be imitated endlessly, and so when it doesn't, players can't help but wonder - why not?

That's absolutely the case with these mechanics, which while widely praised by critics and even warmly recalled by players years, potentially decades later, quickly evaporated into the digital ether.

Given that many of these mechanics could've made an epic impact across a large swath of genres, it's truly odd that they disappeared almost as suddenly as they arrived...

Active reload is one of those elegantly simple but deliciously satisfying mechanics that probably should've taken the shooter realm by storm. And yet, it didn't.

Active reload was first popularised by the Gears of War franchise, effectively serving as a quick time event (QTE) mini-game in which you need to hit the reload button during a small window of time.

If you succeed, you'll reload faster than usual, often with a small combat buff, but if you mistime your button press, the gun will jam for a couple of seconds, leaving you vulnerable to enemy attacks.

It was a brilliant risk-reward mechanic and one that was seemingly relatively easy to implement, and so, why didn't it ever catch on? Hell, Gears of War creator Cliff Bleszinski even straight-up encouraged other games to copy it.

Despite a small scattering of subsequent shooters implementing active reload, the last major games to feature it were Returnal and Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy back in 2021.

Since then it's been bafflingly absent from the gaming space, perhaps suggesting the developers don't much like the feature for one reason or another.