9 replies to this topic

[Moosh]

Something I think about sometimes is the "magic moments" in games that make them feel special to me. What I define as a magic moment, is a small feature or secret that probably didn't take much dev energy to implement, but has a disproportionately large impact and really resonates with me. Some of my own examples:

Opening the Sealed Door
It's common in 3D games to have doors that are just there for geometry and doors that function. Usually you'll see games lean more towards one or the other and you can tell what you're working with. Sometimes there'll be a really out of place one that seems like it should open but doesn't. The one by the secret entance to Hyrule Castle in Ocarina of Time is a good example of this. I always wonder what's behind doors like this. The coolest thing though, would be assuming a door is one of these and later finding a way to open it. I've yet to come up with a good example of this being subverted like that, but tried to create one in LQftH2.

Scenery as a Reward
Sometimes it's cool to go to places just to be there. You might see a place in a cutscene or off in the distance and say "I wanna go there!" Sometimes it can be as mundane as buying a virtual house just to access a room and also experience the myth of home ownership. Games really do take you to new worlds...Anyways, many games only let you go to as many places as can serve a gameplay function. Some like Xenoblade Chronicles are very good about letting virtually no cutscene space or cool side area go inaccessible. Or there's once again Ocarina of Time (this game was very formative okay???) with its occasional pointless secret like hookshotting into the windmill. It's just good to go places, yeah? High places especially. Nargad's Trail Crystal Crusades also scratched this particular itch for me actually. There's this one town with a cool tower and there's this one alcove in the side with some coins that you can see from the top of town. I just immediately thought "Man, I wanna stand in that spot" for no reason but the scenery. Games are beautiful.

Whoa, You Can Do That?
This one's a bit more technical and a bit more dev taxing, but I enjoy when game mechanics present an expectation and then in one case, just subvert it for the fun of it. Usually as a secret or optional thing not every player will see. Like having a baseline for spectacle but for no reason shooting way past it. Dark Souls likes to do this with boss weapons, but only sometimes. The scarcity is what makes it special. I'd also point to games like Yuurand which feature complex hidden playable boss characters. Or secret movement tech that completely redefines how you approach a game like the hyperdash in Celeste or ultra sideflip in Pseudoregalia. It's fun to suddenly feel OP after a game has imposed an artificial cap on what is possible.

So do you have any design choices that qualify as "magic moments"? I'd love to hear.

[klop422]

For me it's mostly when NPCs have more reactions than you'd expect. Link's Awakening is my favourite Zelda game, and, no joke, a large part of that is the number of different reactions Marin has to random things while she's walking with you. The whole thing is over in like 20 minutes, but it's stuff like that that gets you attached to her and makes the game's story hit so hard.

 

In fact, it's a lack of this that makes me so lukewarm on Wind Waker. It's a great game, don't get me wrong, but the fact that Makar and Medli are so bent on just going to where you have to ferry them is just a bit boring compared to what could have been.

 

Obviously, these are just individual moments in their respective games, but they are also symptoms of a larger point of comparision. Still, that's a little outside the scope of this, so I'll leave it at "NPCs with more interactivity than you thought".

 

Other examples in Zelda are people's reactions to masks in OoT, or to outfits in BotW/TotK.

[Moosh]

For me it's mostly when NPCs have more reactions than you'd expect. Link's Awakening is my favourite Zelda game, and, no joke, a large part of that is the number of different reactions Marin has to random things while she's walking with you. The whole thing is over in like 20 minutes, but it's stuff like that that gets you attached to her and makes the game's story hit so hard.

 

In fact, it's a lack of this that makes me so lukewarm on Wind Waker. It's a great game, don't get me wrong, but the fact that Makar and Medli are so bent on just going to where you have to ferry them is just a bit boring compared to what could have been.

 

Obviously, these are just individual moments in their respective games, but they are also symptoms of a larger point of comparision. Still, that's a little outside the scope of this, so I'll leave it at "NPCs with more interactivity than you thought".

 

Other examples in Zelda are people's reactions to masks in OoT, or to outfits in BotW/TotK.

Ooh yes! This is another good one. And similarly, when games have really obscure character interactions. Where you go to a certain place at a specific point in the plot and expect character dialogue to be awkward and out of place, but the designers thought of it and put in new dialogue to account for it. Russ did some of that in Stellar Seas. There's some oddly specific dialogue in response to player choices. 

[Ether]

I think extra NPC dialog is a big one for me too.
 
Metamode's a game where, uh...I had to translate everything as I played it, and all the effort I put in gave me a kind of Stockholm syndrome where I think I had to find it charming no matter how I'd have taken it in English, and chalk up all the awkward bits to bad translations. So I don't know how I'd have reacted if I didn't have to work for it. But there's a nameless NPC with a generic Kools officer sprite who shows up at the end of the game who's like "It's me! We met in Katol!" and that unexpected callback was kinda neat.

(I love it when there's a playable postgame where the dialog's changed, although that's not necessarily low effort.)

 

In that game Russ played played recently, I think Indivisible, there's a city where there's shitty wanted posters of your characters and that was a cool touch. I think in general the feeling that the world is reacting to your actions.

 

I also love obstacles where it's not immediately obvious that they're obstacles you'll be able to pass later, they could plausibly just be part of the scenery, but if you think to go back later it turns out there were secrets there all along. Eiyuu did a bunch of this.

[Haylee]

Being able to recruit and obscure optional party member through some remote method in an RPG is sick as hell and it's part of why I love SaGa so much. It's hysterically obscure requirements for some characters is just pure magic.

[Jamian]

The Zelda series is great with those magic moments. Being able to steal from the shopkeeper in Link's Awakening, at the cost of getting a +1 to your death counter, and being called "THIEF" for the rest of the game, is an easter egg that I still fondly remember.

 

The secret exit from the first ghost house in Super Mario World, which allows you to quickly get power-ups and Yoshi, also comes to mind. The game previously taught you that having a red dot on the map instead of a yellow one meant there was a secret exit in that level, but if you figure out that there can also be secret exits in special levels, and find that particular one, getting such easy access to power-ups becomes a game changer (convenience wise). 

 

[Aevin]

I really enjoy games that have an unfolding design that gives more than you expect. Often that involves there being a whole lot more to the game world than you expect, but it could also mean mechanics. (A handful of spoilers for ancient games follows ...)

 

Some examples that jump to mind are Final Fantasy III, where at one point you discover that the "world map" you've been exploring is a floating island above a much larger world below. A similar thing happens in Tales of Symphonia, where the game is framed as a typical "elemental quest," before the reveal that you've been exploring just one of two twin worlds. I love these kinds of twists enough that it seems like I'm willing to let myself be duped into thinking these games are much smaller than really makes sense, so that I can be impressed by the twists.

 

I also live for wtf moments in the form of shocking surprises. One of my favorite kinds is when you're minding your own business and are assaulted by a powerful enemy out of nowhere. Obviously needs to be handled carefully, but ... Final Fantasy XII springs to mind. You're just poking around in some sewers when a gate swings closed behind you. "Hmm, that's kind of weird, but ... OH DEAR GOD WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT?!" as whatever the heck Cuchulain is supposed to be attacks. Or just wandering around a neat cave when you're assaulted by a random zombie dragon necromancer thing and its undead army. Umbral Cloud captures a similar vibe sometimes, taking clear inspiration from FFXII. Having super powerful "tyrant" type monsters mixed in with regular enemies that can catch you unaware is another way of capturing this feeling. Guess I really like it when the player's expectation of safety is violated, when the normal, comfortable game loop is interrupted by something unexpected that leads to that wtf reaction. It really keeps things from getting dull, and some of those surprises make my fondest memories in gaming.

[Moosh]

The Zelda series is great with those magic moments. Being able to steal from the shopkeeper in Link's Awakening, at the cost of getting a +1 to your death counter, and being called "THIEF" for the rest of the game, is an easter egg that I still fondly remember.

 

The secret exit from the first ghost house in Super Mario World, which allows you to quickly get power-ups and Yoshi, also comes to mind. The game previously taught you that having a red dot on the map instead of a yellow one meant there was a secret exit in that level, but if you figure out that there can also be secret exits in special levels, and find that particular one, getting such easy access to power-ups becomes a game changer (convenience wise). 

I think stuff like this is a big part of what made me a Zelda fan originally, come to think of it. There's just so many of them. And also some of the older games had a sort of air of mystery before the internet came along in full force and spoiled everything. I could never tell where the game designer's creativity would end and so fell for quite a few online and real life rumors. 

 

Also man, the Top Secret Area was another one of those great secrets. Feels so minor in hindsight but I remember finding it as a kid and having my mind blown because both a ghost house had a secret exit and there was no indication otherwise of there being anything on that part of the map.

[klop422]

I also live for wtf moments in the form of shocking surprises. One of my favorite kinds is when you're minding your own business and are assaulted by a powerful enemy out of nowhere. Obviously needs to be handled carefully, but ... Final Fantasy XII springs to mind. You're just poking around in some sewers when a gate swings closed behind you. "Hmm, that's kind of weird, but ... OH DEAR GOD WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT?!" as whatever the heck Cuchulain is supposed to be attacks. Or just wandering around a neat cave when you're assaulted by a random zombie dragon necromancer thing and its undead army. Umbral Cloud captures a similar vibe sometimes, taking clear inspiration from FFXII. Having super powerful "tyrant" type monsters mixed in with regular enemies that can catch you unaware is another way of capturing this feeling. Guess I really like it when the player's expectation of safety is violated, when the normal, comfortable game loop is interrupted by something unexpected that leads to that wtf reaction. It really keeps things from getting dull, and some of those surprises make my fondest memories in gaming.

Not to jump back on the 2015-17 hype, but I think this is one of the big reasons why Undertale got so popular. Just bits of the story where you accidentally kill someone, or where it gets more meta than you expected, or characters you thought were friendly and safe are suddenly antagonists. Obviously this is also tied together with the random NPC interactions, too.

[Jamian]

Chrono Trigger also definitely has a "wow! magic!" moment for me.

 

At the beginning of the game, as you wander around in the first town, which is basically a tutorial area, you go through several situations that seem like vaguely interactive story exposition cutscenes. In most games, those kinds of scenes would be used solely as story exposition moments, where you still get to control your character to a point, like move around to decide who you talk to first, push a button now and then, etc. so that you don't get bored and the experience feels more interactive.

 

Example: You bump into a girl, she falls to the ground and loses her shiny pendant. You regain control, and there's both the girl and the pendant you can interact with. In real life, you'd probably first go check on the person you just bumped into, but that pendant is deviously shiny, it's right there next to you, it's an item you can obviously pick up, and this is a video game, so you're likely to first grab the pendant, then only after that check on the girl.

 

Much later on, we're talking about hours of game time later IIRC (and this is what I find so brilliant about it), you find yourself in court, and several witnesses show up to possibly attest to your character and integrity. Did you grab the pendant first? Whoops, that's a bad point, that means you were more concerned about the valuables than about the person you bumped into. And so on, as this is just one example among several other actions that seemed irrelevant at the time, but that the game secretly recorded. As the witnesses pile up to help the judge decide whether you are guilty or not, you get this "Wtf? The game actually remembered all of that? But that happened hours ago!" feeling. And you'll probably think "that's so cool!" even if you end up being deemed guilty.

Edited by Jamian, 24 January 2024 - 09:34 AM.