Discussion OnceOriginalNowCommon / VideoGames

What is up with the categorisation on this page? Why's there a folder named "miscellaneous examples" containing exactly six examples that don't seem to differ in any meaningful way from the rest of the page, which itself is listed under "other examples" for similarly unclear reasons?

About Bioshock 1: Are the elements mentioned original for it? Because the morality choice in a non-RPG based on actions throughout the game is also present in Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II, and that's ten years older.

Edited by Omeganian

• Final Fantasy X: The use of voice acting rather than strictly text-based dialog was actually seen as a very controversial move, as many Final Fantasy fans feared it would detract from the series' sense of identifiability. Furthermore, while X certainly wasn't the first JRPG to use voice acting, it was the first to really make it an important part of the narrative and use it to enhance the game's sense of cinematic wonder.^note Whereas, earlier voice acting in JRPGs were often poorly dubbed affairs that felt tacked on and a little cheesy. It turned out to not only be a change for the better but a revolutionary development for the RPG genre. The stellar voice acting and cinematics in games like Xenoblade? None of that would've been possible without Final Fantasy X taking this "risk" back in 2001.
  • Even before that, several games had voice acting before Final Fantasy X — games like Lunar: Eternal Blue and Tales of Eternia (which predated Final Fantasy X) indeed look quite cheesy today, and that's not getting into how many games like King's Quest V had voice acting before. Even in 2001, they had started to experience this.
• Logistics and diplomacy in a wargame. From the west came Virgin Interactive with Overlord with trade, military pacts, and planetary bombardment, and from the east came Koei, with Nobunagas Ambition. Both were the first in their genres to combine obsessive resource management with the trappings of a standard setpiece wargame. How much your troops had trained and with what. How much food you had. The market of the food itself. The market behind your weaponry. Spying. Assassinations. Treaties. Aid pacts. Black markets. Taxation. Dividends. And in Nobunaga's case, even marriage was accounted for, as an alternative option to uniting your empire with another's. The information overload was staggering for its time, possibly even for some now. This was not merely there to bolster the wargame part ala Total War either. It was vitally important to do all these things at once lest you fall behind and face unexpected defeat in the coming battle.
  • Similarly, M.U.L.E. was all about managing and developing your resources on a newly founded colony world.
• Minecraft popularized the Sandbox game, even though it was not by any means the first of its kind - Second Life, Furcadia, and Garry's Mod were already old news by the time Minecraft was in development. Because Minecraft was the Trope Codifier for sandbox build-your-own-world game, this has led to some people saying that games like the above were ripoffs of Minecraft.

Excuse me, is this page for Seinfeld Is Unfunny or Trope Codifier? These examples may be all true, but they fail on most important aspect of this trope: How exacly did passage of time make these games look bad in comparison?

• In the late-1990's, "hardware acceleration" was a major buzzword in the video game industry. In October 1996, the 3dfx Voodoo 1 video card was released. Approximately one month later, Tomb Raider (see above) became the first computer game to include out of the box 3D card support. What 3D cards did was give home computers an easy outlet for generating sophisticated 3D graphics and special effects^note Until then, 3D graphics were generated through the computer's internal memory — often with very poor results, since high resolution 3D visuals with effects like trilinear filtering required far more horsepower than most home computers were capable of. Throughout the late-90's, "3D accelerated!" was a major selling point for new computer games, and 3D cards superseded sound cards as "the hot new gaming accessory." Today, with 3D acceleration being a standard item in every home computer released after about 1997 (and, thus, taken for granted by the public at large), it's easy to forget what a major revolution it was in the late-90's.

This doesn't even try to be this trope for simple reason. It's not a game. Obviously Technology Marches On, and something that was once impresive and modern will not be so in few years. But it would only fit this trope, if people didn't use it because for modern times it would be meh.