Little touches in video games which you love

often it's the little details you notice in video games that stick with you the most. particular the ones that catch you by suprise.

here's a few examples of what i'm talking about -

like when a game responds to some little quirk of your play style unexpectedly e.g. in max payne when you're in the lift with the horrendous elevator music and if you shoot the little speaker in the roof max thanks you for it.

or like when you purposely do something you're not supposed to and the game rewards you for it e.g. in dishonored if you kill the male propaganda announcer heard throughout the city on the PA system, in the next level he's replaced with a female (who happens to be carrie fisher).

or just something more general - great delivery of dialogue like half life 2's "that's the old passage to Ravenholm. we don't go there anymore" line, i still get a little chill when i hear that. or a neat immersive graphical touch like that over-the-shoulder-when-you-run cam from the first gears of war, that blew my mind the first time i saw it.

what are some of the little details from games that have stuck with you over the years?

Blood Omen...the guys chained to the walls, squirming, asking for your help, clueless that you're a vampire. Probably about 13 years later or so, I'm at work and this kid about half my age just randomly blurts out "please, help me kind sir!" And i kinda laughed and asked him if he was making a Blood Omen reference. He was. Connected across a generation in a way that never would have happened if Silicon Knights just used glowing red orbs for health like most games.

few more from me. gta v -

when driving and unarmed, hit the shoot button and you stick up a middle finger to the window.

wade into water and you get wet but only up to the part of you the water reaches.

there was this time driving to a mission i noticed an armed gang going into a store, i pulled up next to the store and one of the gang asked if i'd be their get away driver, which i did. that was very cool. the game was full of little unexpected touches like that.

half life 2 -

the great switcheroo of spending a level staving off those deadly starship troopers-esque antlions only to suddenly out of the blue gain control of them and descend on nova prospekt as a pherepod wielding antlion god. that was a seriously awesome moment.

splinter cell chaos theory -

the world is on the brink of world war 3, new york has just been plunged into complete darkness and you're infiltrating private military firm displace trying to find out what their involvement is. as you upload some tracking software into displace's systems, there's a bit of dialogue between sam and grimsdottir -

grim "great, i can't wait to sniff around in displace's laundry basket."

sam "ahh."

grim "what?"

sam "laundry, i totally forgot."

with the world in grave danger, deep in the bowels of a building full of highly trained soldiers, it was a line of dialogue that stood out. it emphasised his human side and that he had a life outside being a secret agent. it just stuck with me for some reason. it's little touches like that which made him such a memorable character

hmmm...

Idle animation, commentary, etc. Like if you go AFK and your character says something like "I ain't got all day" or if you're playing an FPS and he starts doing things with his hands. It's a subtle, amusing way that developers break down the fourth wall. Doesn't happen in many games, however.

Oh! Blizzard's RTS games, when you repeatedly click on a unit, they generally say a bunch of stuff and it's sometimes really funny. I remember the Starcraft Firebat quotes "King of the Hill's" Hank Hill and his propane stuff, for example. Warcraft 3 had some funny ones, too.

Haha Sam Fisher had a good sense of humor in those games, and the banter between him and Grimsdottir and Lambert was pretty funny, definitely worthy of some chuckles. I think it was even funnier because of the voice actor, Michael Ironside; you got this gravelly, deep voice and you know him as this hardass (Scanners, Starship Troopers, etc) in these movies but in Splinter Cell he is still a badass...but he is so calm, so measured, so frank. I mean even when he grabs enemies and interrogates them, there is humor. Total smartass.

"Are you going to kill me" says the goon

"Only if you say 'monkey'" replies Sam.

I mean, to us it's just some funny lines, but they really put a lot of work and time into these things.

lol here are some more

The toy store scene in The Last of Us, in which Ellie picks up a toy robot that will be central later on in a cutscene. She only does it when no one is looking though.

@Black_Knight_00: very cool! hadn't noticed that.

agreed! he was a brilliant character that ubisoft somehow managed to ruin. the interrogations were one of the best things about chaos theory. i couldn't believe ubisoft completely got rid of them for conviction.

when you think back to all the brilliant little touches in chaos theory they got rid of in subsequent games - remote hacking, heat sensors, goggle zoom, recording audio, scanning electrical devices, split jump to climb to the ceiling in corridors, the ocp on the pistol to temporarily disable lights and cameras - it makes you wonder who the hell is making these decisions at ubisoft and what must they think looking back when they see the sorry state the franchise is in these days

I actually wrote a piece about this very thing a few years back! Sadly, the site is now defunct so I can't show it off.

But what triggered the idea was that I was playing Paper Mario: Thousand Year Door and while in the woods of one level there was a flower field, and as you walked through it, little flowers flew up in the air as they were "uprooted". They didn't have to do that! But they did! And it stuck out to me.

GTA4 being able to pistol whip people and picking up objects off the ground and throwing it at NPC'S.

F.E.A.R. throwing grenades or mines in the air in front of the enemy and then shooting them making them explode and kill the enemy.

Crysis if you shoot a dumpster with little wheels on it they spin.

MGS2 when Snake is looking at naughty posters on the tanker and the codec calls that accompany it always made me chuckle.

Max Payne did have quite a few quirks... I remember being totally impressed with how many things you could interact with.

I can't think of too many small things in old games that really got me but recently I have been playing Forza Motorsport 7, when it's raining in that game there are puddles. When you hit the puddle the way the car behaves is totally sublime, exactly like hitting a puddle with a real vehicle.

Hmm, there is many but a thing i enjoy is a eye for detail , like if we take open world games, Rockstar have always had a scary eye for making even the smallest thing in games and make it immersive.

There is nothing worse than a game where the developer takes shortcut, like Ubisoft an example is their open world games Watch Dogs and AC , in Watch Dogs i just can't get past the lack of details in their world, it feels so incomplete that it ruins the game experience, shoot into the water and it does not show, the AI in the world seems robotic or if you jump with a boat it sinks like a rock and does not react to the water like it would normally. Even in a small game like Rainbow Six Siege they took shortcuts, stand behind a car window and its a brick wall.

It´s just lazy and there is nothing worse than laziness.

In mario odyssey when he lays down long enough sometimes a bird will land on his big nose lol. Gotta love that extra effort there.

We all know the books in Skyrim, right?

Well, there is this one book that I really loved. It belongs to a blind guy down in a mine and when you open it, there's just no text in it.

It's the kind of thing I love about games. Small hidden jokes that you have to stumble upon because they're not obvious.

shop windows and shop shelves. For some reason, I love well realised shops in games. Such as the model shop in GTA SA. They're the kind of little detail that really bring the game world to life.

Here's nice touches from Mafia 3 shops.

The first medal of honor, enemies threw your grenades back at you. Caught me completely by surprise and blew my mind. I havent seen many games that do this sort of thing

@henrythefifth said:

shop windows and shop shelves. For some reason, I love well realised shops in games. Such as the model shop in GTA SA. They're the kind of little detail that really bring the game world to life.

Here's nice touches from Mafia 3 shops.

Ya, those things are great but they look kinda bland compared to what Rockstar does

@Jacanuk said:

@henrythefifth said:

shop windows and shop shelves. For some reason, I love well realised shops in games. Such as the model shop in GTA SA. They're the kind of little detail that really bring the game world to life.

Here's nice touches from Mafia 3 shops.

Ya, those things are great but they look kinda bland compared to what Rockstar does

I used to love the joke products in GTA's shops and stores during PS2 era. But on games like GTAIV and V they just look kinda silly. As if Rockstar is just trying too hard to be funny. Pisswisser beer and so on. Just immature. Their games should grow up a bit.

@Macutchi: Been playing through Assassin's Creed: Origins this past weekend and noticed some things that made me think of this thread. Graphically the game is beautiful and I love how the sand looks when it's blowing in the wind and the storms. The thing that stood out the most is the various ways you can use a torch in the game. Beyond just providing light to the immediate area in unlit tombs it can also be used to clear out cobwebs, light other torches and extinguished light sources, set an enemy on fire with a direct attack and it can be thrown at a stack of hay or other flammable to ignite a large area on fire. At one point I found myself throwing the torch at cobwebs just to clear them out of the room because I didn't like looking at them. It was stupid but kinda funny. Thinking about it, I bet the torch can also be used to scare some of the animals in the game, maybe a hyena or something. I'll have to try that out tomorrow.

For me something i always enjoyed was attention to detail in regards to enviroment and sound (think Wild hunt and the Skellige isles)

Another thing that stuck with me going back a few years are small things you can explore on levels/quests that make them seem realistic. I remember the omaha beach map on Medal of Honor: allied assault and running into a squad that cameos Saving Private Ryan in their dialog.

"I am blind, not deaf!" and the workers when you turned them into militia units: "That's it! Time to die..." or "No one else to go..." =]

Also, all of Dark Souls! Literally, all of it, all of Dark Souls...

I always thought the ambient nature sounds of The Witcher 3 were pretty great. I remember riding around White Orchard for the first time, and the sounds of wind, trees rustling, your horse's hooves "plop plop plop"'ing through the mud...it was all incredibly rich. For some reason that wind and trees just made it sound that much creepier to me. In Skellige you could almost always hear the ocean in the background, which was cool, and iirc it got louder as you got closer to the water.

@Ish_basic: I'd say GTA 3's limb damage is the thing that always stuck with me. GTA games after that sort of just didn't bother with limb damage of peds, it would be awesome if GTA 6 had destructible buildings and more gore.