10 Older Games With Better Features Than Modern Games

(whimsical tune) - [Narrator] Old games often got a lot of stuff right that for some reason people seem to have forgotten about. Hi folks, it's Falcon and today on Gameranx 10 older games with better features than modern games. Starting off with number 10, it's Metal Gear Rising blade mode. So seriously, why has this not been copied by anyone? All right, so it feels bizarre to say this, but this game is 11 years old this month, and no one has ripped off what is possibly one of the coolest, most

satisfying mechanics in any action game ever. In most games, when you stun an enemy, you do get the opportunity to follow it up with some kind of takedown, been there, done that. In Rising, when an enemy gets stunned, you get to chop them into a red mist. It is completely absurd, but incredibly satisfying. What makes it even better is you can chop stuff up like, in the environment, like watermelons and other random objects. It's totally pointless, has no reason, but it's awesome and that's what

matters here. (dramatic chopping) Modern games could easily expand on a mechanic like this, and it doesn't even have to be like, the pursuit of ultra violence. Like, think about a puzzle game where you had to cut things to solve puzzles, like remember Fruit Ninja? Fruit Ninja was fun as hell. Don't tell me that the metal gear rising blade mode couldn't be applied to a situation like that in some way that isn't completely awesome. Like, there's just so many opportunities left on the table with th

e whole blade mode mechanic from Metal Gear Rising that remain unfulfilled. How is this the only game with dynamic mesh cutting or whatever you want to call it? I don't care what we call it. Why is it not in more games? Every game with a a bladed weapon should have some variant of this. It's been 11 years! Why is this not a standard thing at this point? And number nine is Dead Space's locator system. Unlike the blade system where it seems like nobody's even tried to replicate it, there's a ton o

f games that do something kind of similar to Dead Space's locator system, but at least in my opinion, nobody's done it as well. A lot of games give you the means to find where the next objective is, but none of 'em are as slick and seamless as this. With just the press of a button, Isaac holds out his hand and a line's drawn on the ground in the direction you need to go for your next objective. (eerie music) (ethereal beeping) There's no special sight or unsightly objective markers, just a clear

line telling you where to go next. If you didn't want to use it, you didn't have to. It wasn't this annoying thing on your screen at all times, blasting you over the head with the next location. When you did use it, it was slick and nice and useful. I remember when Fable 3 tried to do something similar but it was more distracting and annoying, and that's not the kind of dig at Fable 3 that I think some might take it as, it's just, I don't know why they did this in Fable 3. I like Fable 3, but w

ith Dead Space, the locator only appears when you actually want to use it, and it gives you the information you need in a way that doesn't feel out of place or distracting. Of course, this feature does show up in at least one modern game, the Dead Space remake, but that's about it. The only other game that finds a way to point you towards your objectives while also staying immersive is something like the Guiding Wind from Ghost of Tsushima, which hey, great feature, honestly really, really a goo

d feature. Not quite the same thing though. At number eight is Oblivion's Radiant AI, even though it was kind of a mess in practice, a lot of the stuff Bethesda did with AI in Oblivion was pretty revolutionary. Oblivion's version of their system was the most complex and dynamic up 'til that point, and it didn't just give NPCs schedules to follow. It gave 'em things to do and personalities of their own. It was hardly a perfect system. It would lead to these bizarre scenarios that were at very lea

st immersion breaking and at worst could actually ruin gameplay progress, but damn, was it interesting. Yeah, sometimes NPCs would just get lost looking for a spoon. (whimsical music) But this was the first real attempt to have mass NPC simulations occurring in a gigantic open world so kind of a fair trade off. Later Bethesda games became a little less chaotic and more playable at the cost of losing some of the things that made oblivion so interesting. Overall, the more limited version of the Ra

diant AI seen in games like Skyrim, I mean, was for all intents and purposes an improvement, but we don't even have that anymore in modern games. It seems like most modern day games have just kind of given up on AI. Ironic given how ubiquitous AI is becoming, but nowadays they just got NPCs wandering around aimlessly, standing in their stores 24/7. And I'm not just talking about Starfield here. Almost every RPG or Open World Game works the same way. I know Radiant AI could be janky as hell a lot

of the time, but it really made those games interesting and unique, and a modern game, you know, with technology that completely works could, probably do a lot more with it. And number seven is light mechanics from Splinter Cell. Video game lighting has gotten incredibly impressive, but rarely do you interact with it anymore. Most stealth games function purely on line of sight rules rather than the old days like Thief and Splinter Cell making both sound and light levels central mechanics when i

t comes to stealth. Splinter Cell was especially obsessed with light and dark. It gave you so many tools for taking out lights and seeing in the dark better to stalk your prey. Modern games focus on ease of use and visibility over everything else, and it does make for more fast paced, readable stealth, but you lose a lot of the atmosphere and tension of older sneaking games. There's just something really satisfying about entering a room and carefully shooting all the lights out in a Splinter Cel

l game, which leaves all the guards blind and you turn on night vision and you just pick 'em off one by one. It's crazy. You feel like the coolest person who has ever lived. When light doesn't matter as much in these games, some of the depth of the mechanics are just lost. Like, it flattens the game overall. And while I wouldn't want every game to just focus on hiding in the dark to avoid enemies, I feel like stealth focused games have overcorrected in the wrong direction. And number six is WWE

14's create a story mode. You might think this is stupid and really there are many, many ways in which the old WWE games are way better than the new ones, like, people have thoroughly cataloged that. But if there's one feature the old games had that every modern game with a create a character should have, it's the create a story mode. For a short period in the mid 2010s, this mode was responsible for just some of the funniest crap I've ever seen. Yeah, it's fun to download community creations li

ke Super Mario and Taylor Swift and have a fight, but it's even better when somebody makes a meticulous story mode detailing why they fight. Video Game Championship Wrestling was built entirely using this story mode editor. They managed to create some of the most deranged crossovers the internet has ever seen, and in general, more games should include tools like this, even if, yeah, it's probably not very cost-effective, it is tremendously entertaining. And number five, the interconnected world

from Dark Souls. There were two Dark Soul sequels. There was Bloodborne, Sekiro, Elden Ring. Yet for some reason the studio never quite returned to the formula introduced in the first game. There's been plenty of copycats and similar games, but nobody's quite managed to do what the First Dark Souls did, which was create this truly interconnected 3D environment. There's plenty of 2D side scrolling Metroidvanias that have pulled something like that off, but other than maybe the Metroid Prime serie

s, which is also kind of doing its own thing, no other game has quite managed to pull off what Dark Souls did, and honestly, not even they were able to fully, completely pull it off. The first half of the game extremely dense with interwoven areas crossing over and connecting with each other. Second half, mostly built from standalone areas that can be only accessed one way, and it's generally pretty linear. Elden Ring, massive game, but it fits much more into an open world formula. Someday I'd l

ike to see something really take the interconnected world of Dark Souls and really run with the idea. Just go crazy with secret doors, optional areas and unexpected connections. It's gotta be hell to actually design. That's probably why there's so few that have actually attempted to do it, but I would love to see what a really talented studio could do with such a concept. (birds chirping) (hits thudding) (footsteps thudding) (dramatic tune) And number four is Crackdown's keys to the city. Every

open world action game should have a mode like this, but almost none of them do. Keys to the city was added to the original Crackdown in a free update, basically acts as a sandbox mode, lets you do whatever the hell you want. I know a lot of survival games have a sandbox mode, but rarely do you see open world games do it, like, just fully open world games, games that aren't survival games, and they're probably the type of game that could benefit from it the most. It sucks cheat codes are basical

ly a thing of the past, but is it really hurting developers to put in some kind of alternate game mode where we can just screw around and have fun? I know all the excuses that these modes are buggy and hard to support, but when does that stop games from coming up before, like, you want to tell me that the people who have been putting out games for the last decade refuse to allow bugs? Like, their quality control is so good that bugs are the reason they're not doing something? Yeah, no, that's BS

. I know there's legitimate reasons why a developer wouldn't want to bother with a feature like this, but I don't care. They're fun and I wish more games had stuff like keys to the city. (gunshots thudding) (siren wailing) (explosions booming) And number three is Final Fantasy 12, the Zodiac Age. The speed up features. A lot of modern RPGs give you a means of speeding up battle, whether it's auto battle or a literal speed up, but as far as I know, nobody has really done it like Final Fantasy 12,

The Zodiac Age. Keep in mind, I am not talking about the original game here, I am talking about the Remaster, which has the incredibly novel feature of allowing you to speed up the game whenever you want. By that I mean you aren't limited to hitting the fast forward during battle, you can do it any time. The game lets you pick up times two, times four, and you could really book it when you really get up there. This is a feature I would like to see in more games, not just RPGs, games period. Eve

ry game should just let you hit the fast forward button when you need to speed up boring travel times or tedious sections that you've maybe seen before. Hell, throw in some kind of automation and you got a legit fast forward button. Let us control our games like a movie and skip around and rewind and do whatever. It's probably not gonna be a common feature anytime soon due to technical reasons, but I'd like to see it all the same. Like, imagine the replayability this would add. There's a lot of

games I don't return to just because there is so much tedious crap in them that you could basically skip. (whimsical music) (character grunts) At number two is Eternal Darkness' Sanity mechanic. The original just does it best. A lot of horror games include some kind of basic sanity mechanic where your screen shakes, your vision gets blurry, but nothing comes close to what Eternal Darkness Sanity's Requiem manage to accomplish. Instead of a few boring screen effects, Eternal Darkness would get cr

eative when you'd lose sanity. It'd make cockroaches crawl on the screen or trick into thinking you're losing game progress or the screen would just flat out mess up. They do the kind of stuff you'd see in Batman Arkham under fear gas, but any time. I feel like there's a lot of potential left on the table with this type of thing. Like, a modern game could really go crazy with the sanity effects if they really wanted to. I feel like there's an opportunity to do something really surprising and cre

epy using some of the ideas from Eternal Darkness, but no modern game is really trying. And finally at number one, it's Half-Life 2's Gravity Gun. So many games have tried to copy the Gravity gun, but none of them have dethroned the king. I'm not just talking about the blatant ripoffs, like the grabber from the Duke 3 expansion. I'm also talking about the dozens of games that have psychic powers where you can grab and throw things with your mind. Don't get me wrong, a lot of games have great psy

chic powers, but they're just not as satisfying as the gravity gun from Half-Life 2. The thing just feels right to use. From puzzle solving to zombie slaying, it all just works perfectly, and there's only one game that's managed to do something even close to what the original Half-Life 2 did, and that's Half-Life Alex, and even there, it's not quite the same. What made the gravity gun so good was how versatile it was and how much fun it was to use for everything. In general, modern games don't l

et you play around with physics as much. You either get games entirely dedicated to realistic physics like VMMG drive or you get everything else where physics hardly even comes into play anymore. There's just so much more that could be done with a gravity gun, but there's just nothing like the original. (ethereal whirring) (objects thudding) I got a couple of bonus ones for you here too. You probably thought about it the whole video and so have I, but Red Faction Gorilla, all the destruction. Yo

u know how this goes, I talk about it all the time, but it's still true. It's never not true. There's still nothing else like Red Faction Gorilla and it sucks. Just imagine a modern game running on an SSD with this amount of destruction. It could be mind blowing, but nobody has even attempted it. Some smaller games and The Finals, which is not even kind of the same type of game, have managed to pull off some impressive physics destruction, but it's just not the same. We just need a story game wi

th this tech in it. I would really love to see a new Red Faction game, honestly, but if we can't get that, somebody needs to make a spiritual success at Gorilla. Next, Middle Earth Shadow of Mordor's Nemesis system. Another obvious one, but come on, we've got just two games that use this unique system that makes enemies feel so much more alive and reactive. The second game managed to build on the concept with a lot more variation and enemy responses and characters, and it just stopped after that

. No other game even tried to do something similar other than Assassin's Creed Odyssey, and that barely counts. The thing that sucks probably more than any other feature on this list though, is that it's a patented idea. The publisher decided that nobody should be able to use it, and I just kind of feel like that's BS. It's probably not legally defensible in all honesty, except for the fact that nobody wants to spend the money litigating it. Finally, 2014's Thief: The Swoop. One more quick one h

ere, the fourth Thief game is just universally reviled for good reason. It's not a good reboot of their legendary series, but there's one thing that I really like in this game, and it's the swoop. It's basically a dodge, but for stealth. It's a move where you quickly dart forward and you can easily dart between shadows without drawing attention. I really like this mechanic and I wish more stealth games had it. It's a simple idea that's basically a more grounded version of blink from Dishonored,

but it just feels really good to use and takes a lot of the guesswork out of sneaking from shadow to shadow. And that's all for today, leave us a comment, let us know what you think. If you like this video, click like. If you're not subscribed, now's a great time to do so. We upload brand new videos every day of the week. Best way to see them first is of course a subscription, so click subscribe. Don't forget to enable notifications. And as always, we thank you very much for watching this video.

I'm Falcon, you can follow me on Twitter at Falcon The Hero. We'll see you next time right here on Gameranx.