Little details you've noticed in your favourite games
Sometimes it's the small, seemingly insignificant, details in Games that enhance the fun or keep you investment in the games world. What small touches of detail have you noticed and enjoyed in games.
Here are a few of mine:
Halo (the original) - The way firing the assault rifle would pepper a wall with big bullet holes as you filled some unfortunate elite full of lead. I think it was toned down in the sequels.
Ghost Recon 1&2 - Moving through open countryside was often tense as you scanned the tree line for enemies. I enjoyed the fact that your men could take people out without you ever setting eyes on them. One of your squad would whisper enemy spotted, you'd look around and see nothing but trees then you'd hear a shot followed by, "Got him."
Far Cry 2 - The guards talking as they hunt for you. It's been done before I'm sure but it works so well in Far cry 2. There is nothing like hiding in the corner of a shack after a fire fight and hearing a group of men just outside getting up their nerve to rush you. The fact that some of them speak in African dialects adds to the atmosphere.
Far Cry 2 - When you are on a railway bridge, or a similar bridge with open wooded slats over a long drop, the shell casings from your weapon sound like they are falling on wood and then tumbling down between the slats and into space. It's a great little detail.
Mass Effect - The sound of the big enemy ship. In the one of the behind the scenes films, one of the sound people said they created the effect by recording (and then messing about with) the sound of a bear proof waste bin being opened and closed.
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I liked the implementation of tracking/pathfinding in Mount & Blade. Other war parties would leave little arrows(tracks) as they passed that you could see/follow with the right skills and those arrows would brighten as you followed and got closer to them.
Jagged Alliance 2 - various phrases and banter the various mercs spout in various situations. Their infightings, sympathies and grudges. Really lots of polish went into something that`s not central to the game mechanics. Labour of love indeed.
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The Delta Force games were always really good about modeling bullet drop for long range weapons fire. I loved that.
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In SFIV Zangief's animation is a bit off. As he walks forward, look at the heel of the foot closest to the screen. You'll see it skips slightly.
EDIT:
I should explain that I like this because it's such an odd thing to happen in an otherwise very well-produced game. It's cool to point out to people.
Descent Freespace: your alien allies didn't speak English. The translations were done by the same human guy, and overlaid (but didn't replace or even drown out) their weird alien squawks.
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Fallout 3 - In the Enclave stronghold there's a cafeteria with a grated floor. If you go to the area below it you'll find a bunch of dropped silverware that fell through. Doh!
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NWN2 - Unique Conversations - I really liked the dialog that would happen with different characters in the group. Just listening to different conversations that would take place was interesting enough, but some of them truly became laugh-inducing. Grobnar & Sand have at least one conversation still embedded in my brain, and I smile everytime I think about it - it was that good
Deus Ex + others - Being given the ability to go anywhere and do anything was amazing. The way that skills could be utilized to find a different path from A to B was great as well.
Deus Ex + others - Optional minor & major events being remembered and/or brought up at a later date in conversations. The ladies bathroom in Deus Ex, Megaton in Fallout 3, etc.
"You're right, I should never argue The IT Crowd with you. You can be Moss, and I'll be Roy." - Bonus_Eruptus
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This is sort of an inside joke, but I love what the Nob Squad in Dawn of War 2 says when you send them to capture a point: "Where's the bleeding FLAG?!" The previous versions of Dawn of War had flags on the points, which were customizable by users. That feature was removed from Dawn of War 2 because of GFWL and Microsoft's hostility toward user-created content.
In World of Warcraft, in the ruins of Andorhal, one of the quests has you light a beacon at each of several ruined towers. Inside the towers are heads hanging on meat hooks. If you look closely at them, you'll notice their eyes are blinking. It's that kind of attention to detail that always blew me away about WoW. You don't have to go inside these towers for the quest, in fact most players probably wouldn't. But those heads are still there, blinking their eyes. Of course, WoW is full of in jokes, silly NPC names and other minutae--you could probably fill a forum just with those.
Some of the idle animations in the various Command and Conquer games are fun. Soldiers will do jumping jacks, for example, or spar with each other, or just sit down.
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In Left4Dead, the survivors were burning money in the campfire at the start of Blood Harvest.
merphle wrote:
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Holy crap, I didn't notice that. AWESOME!!
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I think one of the most memorable moments that I've ever experienced in a game was in Gothic. When I walked into a forest and a pack of wolves was chasing a mole. They finally cornered it, and circled it, while the mole tried to back up against a tree and fought back. Eventually they overpowered it by using, what I would consider, proper wolfpack tactics. Then proceeded to eat it. As I walked by, they looked at me, but kept on eating their kill. That game also blew me away with how it implemented 'idle chat' among the NPCs, as well as the day/night cycles and how people go about their business during the day. It required almost no suspension of belief to be convinced that all the little people in the town each have their jobs and go about their business regardless of my being there or not.
(@)
Most recent:
GRID - Watching a replay of a race in Wash., DC. My car is traveling across the Memorial Bridge and the camera is fixed closely to the vehicle. As the camera slowly pulls back you get a view of the Potomac River and Lincoln Memorial in the distance. Most impressive is the row of flags lining the bridge, alternating US flags and car sponsors, all flapping in the wind un-synchronized.
It was just a gorgeous sight.
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Thief 2 - In the level called "Life of the Party", as you are heading towards the Mechanist's tower, you happen upon a rooftop with a row of bottles on one of it's ledges. If you look over the edge you can see a dead guard far below on the street. Guess they meant it when they said not to drink on the job!
Thief: Deadly Shadows - The sleeping guard in the second mission who's having a nightmare about bats.
Swing harder! Swing harder!
-- Lilarcor, Baldur's Gate 2
Near the ramp that leads up to the Rivet City bridge there is a leaky pipe. Where the water hits the ground there is a cluster of glistening mushroom like growths. When I fist saw it I thought, "Yes, there would be something growing there."
... herald of Piggledy 'Destroyer of Worlds.' XBL = Higgley (Friend me up!)
Relax. It's Higgledy - Elysium
I spiiiiiiiiiill my drink! Seriously, I think I played around with the DX1 volume slider over and over again just to hear that.
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Hahahah I loved that. I still say it randomly, but of course nobody gets it.
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The little things in Morrowind, that are stories, with no quests. So incredibly rewarding. e.g. there's pages of a diary scattered in a Telvanni dungeon out in the Grazelands, or the last words of Indy, next to a skeleton pinned under a boulder...
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Probably the cream of the crop were the multi click sound clips or actions in Warcraft II- STOP POKING ME! Might be my first easter egg. I would often lose matches because I was so busy making sheep explode.
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In Bloodmoon there was an ice cave containing a skeleton whose feet had been suspended to the ceiling; he was trying to reach for his sword, which was stuck in a snowpile right beneath him. Evidently the force was not with that guy.
Thought of another one.
No One Lives Forever - The random conversations the H.A.R.M. guards would have when you sneak up on them undetected. NOLF was one of the first games to feature these little easter eggs for skilled stealth gamers.
Personified by the "Criminal Sociology" conversation.
360/iOS: DJ Dostoevsky
Forgot about those, they were excellent games with some truly imaginative npc conversations.
"You're right, I should never argue The IT Crowd with you. You can be Moss, and I'll be Roy." - Bonus_Eruptus
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Conversations between bored guards in any of the Thief games. I'd stand there and listen to the whole darn thing, and they're pretty much all hilarious.
I loved the one where the two sets of guards across from each other started insulting the ladies that the other was guarding, and if you waited long enough it ended with them shooting arrows at each other.
Every Valve game is stuffed to the GILLS with this stuff, to the point where I'm still finding new things in Half-Life 2 when I replay it 5 years later. Some other great ones from Left 4 Dead:
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Busy playing Titan Quest at the moment, there is a hero monster you kill with a name something like Beastman #783. Once you kill him he drops a letter he has written to his mom talking about his quest for equal rights for female members of the Beastman army, thanking her for her care package and how they are tired of being robbed by 'Heroboy.' It's a cute meta moment in an otherwise fairly charmless game.
I'm only playing TQ because Sacred 2 doesn't work on my system. But that is a game full of charming touches. It's basically a parody of the genre, and there are awesome death cries from enemy NPCs. My favourite, as you kill a kobold he cries out, 'And today is my birthday!'
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Mystic Violet wrote:
Pizza Tycoon was pretty rift with corruption. You could do jobs for the mafia, bomb the competition, or bribe cops. But topping all that was the Mayor. Once in a while he would contact you for a competition, asking you to pay a fee to enter. I figured why not triple that amount and see what happens? In the following weeks, he visited all my restaurants and awarded stars for "hygene" and "general excellence"
Roo wrote:
Quintin_Stone wrote:
In Max Payne, you can overhear a guard telling his partner that he named his gun "Dick Justice".
In Max Payne 2, many televisions show episodes of Dick Justice, a detective show that parodies the events of the first game.
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Short Round in Ultima IV..
One of my favorites was stumbling upon the Kilrathi Spaceship crashed in the field in Ultima VI.. that was a nice touch.
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85's face the truth you're too dumb.
In Dead Air anyone else notice that the only food in some of the saferooms was bags of dog food?
I remember seeing that, that WAS awesome.
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One of the first times I walked through the deserted throne room on the way into the Undercity in WoW I stopped and listened to what sounded like voices in the wind. It was the scene where Arthas killed his father. I haven't heard it since, and have never been really sure if I heard it the first time. Pretty cool, though.
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