Games have evolved considerably ever since players moved a pair of blocks to hit a ball. Yet, there are common threads in every game.
Certain mechanics like health, skill progression, damage, and many others exist in most games in some manner or another. While players typically expect some of these mechanics based on the genre they’re playing,there are some games out there that have taken those staple mechanics and reinvented them.
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Some of these reinventions have become so popular thatother games now use them instead of the original mechanic. As a game history nerd (and a history nerd, in general), I found it extremely interesting to see how a game mechanic has evolved and been reinvented over time.
You might be in for a few surprises, too, with this list of games that have reinvented classic mechanics.
To compile this list, we picked out some classic mechanics that are staples of popular genres (shooters, RPGs, etc.) and examined games that have taken some of those classic mechanics and reinvented them in a way that is both unique yet still close enough to the original to not be considered a new mechanic as a whole.
10Base-Building Mechanics: Enshrouded
Putting Bases Together Piece By Piece
Enshrouded
I play a lot of survival games, soI’m pretty used to base-building mechanics. In most cases, survival games use a grid system that allows players to put base pieces together.
For example, every wall or floor piece snaps to a grid. You’re not able to put a piece diagonally unless the grid allows it.
While this isn’t necessarily a bad mechanic, it does reduce the freedom a player has to build structures.Enshroudedreinvented base-building mechanics by using a voxel system instead of a grid.
The building mechanic is the same at the core, with players having to get enough resources and putting the pieces together to complete a structure. The difference is that Enshrouded allows players towork with small pieces that don’t necessarily attach to a grid, although players can still use snapping tools to make building easier.
The reinvention allows me to create everything from a Gothic castle to a Hobbit home with precise details.
9Crafting: Minecraft
Having Enough Resources Is No Longer Enough
Building on my love for survival games,Minecrafthas been a game I’ve returned to time and time again. It was also one of the first games I noticed that really changed how you crafted weapons, tools, and other items in a survival game.
Typically, crafting involves having enough of the correct resource, and then simply choosing the item that you want those resources to convert to. Sometimes you need a crafting station of some sort to complete the process.
Minecraft reinvented the crafting mechanic by requiring players to put the required resources they need in the correct shape on the crafting table. Before a bunch of guides were out showing players what conformations made what items, you basically had to experiment a lot to discover all the different items you could make.
A classic example is creating a stone axe. To make one, you had to put two sticks in the middle grid slots, and then three blocks of stone or whatever resource you wanted the axe to be made of in the left corner.
This reinvention of the mechanic made discovering new items and tools satisfying since you never knew exactly what would work or what would be made.
8Player Alignment: Fable 2
Visual Changes To Characters Based On Alignment And Stats
The RPG genre is full of classic mechanics like health, damage, skill progression, and player alignment. In fact, the concept of player alignment is straight from tabletop systems.
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republicis one of the first games, if not the first, to use player alignment in a really cool way. When your player started leaning either toward the Light or Dark side of the Force,the player’s character would visually change.
Dark-aligned characters would basically look evil. The originalFablegame also had a similar mechanic, with player alignment determining a character’s appearance.
Fable 2reinvented the player alignment mechanicto also include certain stats. For example, when your character becomes stronger by increasing the Strength stat, your player looks a whole lot beefier.
As someone who typically plays good-aligned characters, even I had to do a few evil playthroughs just to appreciate the menacing appearance my character gained along the way.
7Skill Progression: The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind
Level Up The Skills You’re Actually Using
The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind
Skill progression is a common mechanic in many games. Although it’s typically associated with RPGs, other game genres have also snatched it over the years.
In the classic sense, skill progression is typically tied to level advancement. In Baldur’s Gate (the original), for example, when you level up, that’s when you get a certain number of skill points that you can then allocate among your skills or attributes.
The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowinddecided toreinvent skill progression by tying advancement to the skills that you actually use. While you still level up in the game, skill progression is directly tied to skills.
So, as someone who likes to stealth kill with daggers a lot, I’m always stealthing around and using one-handed blades. As such, my stealth and one-handed weapon skills are typically always the first to reach their respective caps.
There’s a big debate over whether the classic form of the skill progression mechanic is the best versus the way that Bethesda does it, but regardless of where you land on the argument, there’s no question that Morrowind took skill progression and reinvented it.
6Enemy AI Behavior: The Forest
AI That Actually Learns Your Behavior
We’re back in survival game territory with The Forest, which I think was one of the pioneers for reinventing enemy AI behavior.Classically speaking, enemy AI behavior is pretty dumb.
They’re programmed to attack the player, and that’s basically it. They have no sense of preservation or even seem to acknowledge their partners.
The Forestreinvented enemy AI behavior by making it incredibly smarter. Not only do they learn about you, as the player, but they also react to each other. As an example, after wounding one of the cannibals, I saw one of its tribe mates drag him away for healing (or eating, honestly).
As you attack in certain ways or build your base with certain traps or defenses in mind,they learn more and more and come up with strategies or use weapons to get pastthem. Reinventing enemy AI behavior not only makes The Forest so much fun to play, but it also makes it a whole lot scarier.
5Sanity Meter: Amnesia: The Dark Descent
Staying Sane Is Hard
Amnesia The Dark Descent
If I’m playing a survival horror game, then I always love a good sanity meter. Although sanity meters are pretty common in some form or another in a lot of cosmic horror games these days, credit for the meter can go all the way back toEternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem.
A sanity meter is basically a classic game mechanic that keeps track of just how sane a character is before things start to get really weird. In Eternal Darkness’s sake, if players went a little too crazy, then they experienced scary things like bleeding walls or technical issues with their console.
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Amnesia: The Dark Descentreinvented the sanity meter by marrying it to light and making it a core component of the game.To stay sane, characters have to find matches, lanterns, or any kind of light source.
However, this also exposes them to the monsters lurking about, which also drains their sanity. Instead of just avoiding monsters, which is what you had to do in Eternal Darkness, Amnesia forces the player to really play strategically with keeping their sanity meter down.
4Gaining Max Health: Valheim
No Leveling Health Here
One of the most common mechanics in a game is health, with several sub-mechanics attached to it. For example, gaining more health is typically done as a player levels up.
Whether they attribute more points to their health or their health pool just expands naturally, those are essentially two classic health mechanics.Valheimapproached gaining more health differently.
It reinvented gaining health by having players cook food, and then more advanced food, to get more health. As I quickly learned when I first played Valheim,eating berries alone just won’t cut it.
Eating high-quality food is a must-have to defeat the challenging dangers and bosses waiting for you. This reinvention of gaining more maximum health is one of the many reasons why Valheim is one ofthe best survival gamesin the past few years.
Players have to spenda little more time preparing and strategizingto get the most health possible before heading out to take on a boss.
3Regenerating Health: Halo 2
A Complete Game Changer
On the topic of health mechanics, there was another huge game that completely reinvented how the health mechanic works, particularly in shooters. Back in the day, when you took damage, you typically kept the damage until you found some sort of healing item to restore your health.
Halo 2introduced health regeneration as a reinvention of the health or healing mechanic.As long as the player didn’t take damage for a time, their health would return.
The original Halo introduced the concept of regeneration, but it had players regenerating their shields rather than their health.
This reinvention of the classic mechanic became so popular that it’s pretty common to see health regeneration in most shooters now. Even non-shooters have started to adopt health regeneration in some titles.
It just goes to show that sometimes a reinventioncan completely overtake a classic mechanic.
Red Dead Revolver
Easily one of the coolest parts of The Matrix was when Neo dodged bullets. That ability, with time slowing down and Neo gracefully bending out of the way to avoid the bullets, became known as Bullet Time.
TheMax Paynegames were among the first, if not the first, to create a Bullet Time mechanic. In games, Bullet Time basically refers to a mechanic that slows down time, allowing the player to either escape from harm or do a great deal of harm in a short amount of time.
In Max Payne, players could quickly fire their weapons at an enemy while time was slowed.Red Dead Revolvertook the Bullet Time mechanic and reinvented it into Dead Eye.
In Dead Eye, time isn’t just slowed, but players can actually target a number of different spots on an enemy’s bodyto fire once Dead Eye’s duration is over. It’s an effective mechanic for wild west duels. In fact, it’s the only reason I was able to win most of those duels.
The Dead Eye mechanic made it intoother incredible Rockstar gameslikeRed Dead Redemptionand its sequel. Rockstar didn’t invent Bullet Time, but it sure made the mechanic even cooler by reinventing it.
1Damage: Solder of Fortune
Limb Dismemberment Was Born Here
Soldier of Fortune
While health is a pretty common mechanic in games, damage is just as common. The damage mechanic is also pretty straightforward. The player makes contact with something, and their health is reduced.
In the classic sense, damage refers to a target’s whole. A player chops a tree, and the tree’s entire health decreases.Soldier of Fortune reinvented damage mechanics by adding limb dismemberment.
With this reinvention of the mechanic, damage isn’t dealt to the whole body on its own. It’s also applied to specific limbs. When I shoot an enemy, for example, their body crumbles if I take out one of their legs.
Without a leg, they fall to the ground,which allows me an easier time finishing them off and rescuing hostages. Soldier of Fortune took things further, too, by adding special statuses to limbs based on how much you damaged them.
A lot of other games have since used this reinvention of the damage mechanic, likeFallout 3, where players can use VATS to target specific limbs to damage. It just goes to show that some reinventions can stick around for a long time.
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