Cheat codes. They're mostly just DLC and seasonal passes now.

Game manuals. You used to have a short novella that came with the game. Some games like Wasteland 1, the manual was part of the game itself. Now you get jack shit.

Ragdoll physics have kinda fallen by the wayside but they're so much fun

Inventory Tetris. Whenever a game has the player carry stuff in hammerspace it’s almost always done by using a weight system like how Bethesda does it. I want resident evil style inventory where items can take up multiple space slots.

LAN gaming

I feel like cel shading never took off they way it could have. Outside of anime style games it seems like it always takes a back seat to realism which sucks because it's looks rad as hell. XIII and Viewtiful Joe are two examples that stick out in my memory, plus Wind Waker pissed off so many Zelda fans who wanted a grimdark Peter Jackson LoZ game. It was great.

Virtual Pets in games. Like the mag system in Phantasy Star Online or the Chao in Sonic Adventure, such a fun way to waste time, especially since I already enjoy v-pets.

Even Battlefield itself barely used it, but destructible environments. I played both Bad Company games and the destruction was great. Battlefield 3, as much as I love the game, regressed when it came to destructible environments. I barely played BF4 but I remember they made some maps have scripted destruction.

One of my least favourite things in the entertainment industry is when a new innovative or interesting thing is in an otherwise mediocre/terrible product, its used as a justification to never do it again. Of course, you can go far in the other direction and assume that because something is different means it is "good", whatever that means. I appreciate artistic risk taking tho

There's probably a decent number of random mechanics in RTSes that got used once and then never again. I remember Act of War had the prisoner mechanic, which encouraged aggressive risk taking play. It was present in the sequel but I think they could have leaned into it further. Not that any random mechanic is going to be generally applicable. I always wanted RTSes to be more asymmetric but that's harder for balance and the marketing of "competitive" ranked play.

A mechanic I really enjoyed in a recent game was from Enlisted. It's a competitive (as in, you're playing against other humans) first person shooter, but your respawns are your bot squad. Most of the time when you're shooting at a rando crossing a field, it's a bot. This experience meant that even the worst players were getting kills and having an effect (by killing the better players respawns). I'm not terrible but not that good at FPSes either, but I found the experience way less frustrating overall. The rest of the game was mid. Freemium. But I'd be interested to see that in other games.

I remember an old game called Metal Fatigue, which had a battle layers mechanic. Obviously many city/base builders have had this for ages, but I could totally see it in a modern imagining of the current Palestinian thing. Having a multilayered tunnelling mechanic to fight over.

I think overall when I'm playing non-competitive indie games, my main gripe is usually "I wish this game was the same except for this thing from another game". Modding is generally less available nowadays, and I'm not the most amazing coder so remaking the whole game with the extra mechanic from scratch isn't really an option (probably).

I'm not sure what you're talking about, because dynamic contextual music is pretty damn standard nowadays, especially for bigger budget titles. DOOM 2016 and DOOM Eternal made extensive use of it. BG3 does it.

Most shit still present in TF2 like:

• Open chat. I like to get in rivalries and talk shit with the enemy team.

• Server setups. It could be a pain to find a good server with room, but it meant you could pick a tryhard server for a while, maybe go back to your usual spot and meetup with the gang, then try some server that solos your favorite map 24/7, before taking a bite and trying out one with crazy

• Mods. Maybe somebody had a half-finished mario kart server. Or a randomizer where you got a random gun and attributes.

The arcade experience. I remember that feeling of walking into a new arcade and just spending hours discovering shit. Walking down the line and seeing some faves, then seeing some crazy machine you've never seen and popping in a quarter ands hooting bad guys together with a wisecracking rando.

Arcades also let you readily and cheaply engage with physical mechanics. You might crawl onto a motorbike and physically tilt your body to steer, dance like a nut until you were sweating and panting, or crawl INSIDE of a jeep and shoot dinosaurs with a mate while velociraptors roar behind you.in surround sound

Dynamic music is absolutely still a thing, I'm not even sure where you got the idea it went away. Street Fighter 6 is an easy example of round-by-round change, and literal second-by-second changes (I think really generation?) are used in non-setpiece parts of BotW and BotW 1.5. It's even more overt in Untitled Goose Game.

DS Download play was the shit and it sucks that it hasn't been used more.

I don't know how common it is but it's certainly not dead, it's a staple of Mario games and lately I've been playing Returnal which has some fucking rad dynamic music.

Anyway my answer is "not being a walled garden." I appreciate having official servers that don't suck ass and matchmaking and meticulous balance and stuff like that, but I'll trade it all in a heartbeat for a server browser full of 900 ping russian hosts and easy-to-mod json/xml files.

Heavy moddability and easy to make player bots for solo play. I played so many hours on jedi knight 1 with the insane amount of mods and player made single player levels.

SSX 3 is one of my favorite all-time games and the dynamic music was one of the reasons. Not only is the soundtrack full of amazing artists and songs, elements of the tracks duck or swell contextually. As you soar into massive air tricks, the lyrics drop out and then the music crescendos when you nail the landing. When you glide through an ice cave, the leads and highs hush and the bass and rhythm push like an underground river until you reach the surface and the other tracks rush back in. It’s great.

linear levels. i am well aware this hasn't fallen totally out of use, and there are tons of great games being made in a linear fashion still. i'm very aware of that fact, and i'm happy about it. but i HATE open world and rarely see it implemented in a good way. i miss when games had linear levels, like missions after each other. the biggest example for me is halo, a game series that means a lot to me as CE was one of the first video games i ever played. with the release of infinite, there was a shift away from beautifully designed and curated experiences that make up each level. with individual levels you could truly see how much dedication the developers put into the game in a way that the open-world randomized bullshit cannot show.

when your inventory was this little "tetris" game , where you had to arrange your loot accordingly

this one was never really popular, but hardware gimmicks. from the light gun to dance pads, going through wii motion controllers or even double screen of the ds and wiiu (fuck you nintendo for abandonning the wiiu) I really miss having different ways of playing games that was not only game pads or keyboard + mouse. even if the games were not great, having some physical interaction with them was fun to explore. sadly, even when they were "common", not many games made very good use of them, resulting in most games being mediocre at best

the closest modern equivalent I can think about is VR and it is not something I want to play with

The Pokemon Contests (using the Pokemon's moveset to appeal to judges, rather than combat) from Ruby Sapphire was my favourite part about those games. I wish they'd bring them back.

Fmv cutscenes, especially the horrible cheesy ones. It's like you found the worst actors in your local drama theatre and gave them a budget of 25 dollars. I love it.

The patent expired for loading screen mini games didn't it. How come those never came back?

Splitscreen, level editors, and also unlockable costumes/skins for doing certain things (side missions, achievements, that kinda stuff).

Level builders/editors

Splitscreen

K/D ratio - I know it's still in a lot of games but quite a few mainstream shooters have removed it

Aim assist being in everything - if it's crossplay, sure, level the playing field, but if it's console v console there's no need for that shit.

In some old CRPGs like Fallout 2 there was a bar to type in keywords to skip to conversation trees about specific topics. I don't see that nowadays, but always preferred it in more dialogue heavy games.