8 Retro Mechanics We Need In Modern Video Games

One of the greatest and most exciting gaming fads of the early 2000s was the increasing implementation of highly destructible environments, as was most famously popularised by Red Faction and its Geo-Mod tech.

The series became renowned for the player's ability to deform the environment with heavy weaponry, and even blast new entry and exit points for themselves where necessary.

Other notable games with extensive destruction mechanics include Battlefield: Bad Company 2, Teardown, and Crysis, to name just a few. And yet over the last decade-or-so, destructible environments have largely gone away.

Now, it goes without saying that allowing the player to wreck most or even all of the game world presents some massive technical challenges, given the resource-intensive nature of making every piece of land deformable, and the potential for players to skip large swaths of a level in doing so.

But it also makes games feel so alive, like there aren't any limitations and the world truly is our sandbox in the most ultimate sense. 

Given that graphical fidelity seems to be reaching a plateau, why not spend some more of those precious resources on stuff like this instead?