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Game innovation since the 90's... hmmmm

Captain Forever jumps to mind with it's module-based ship construction. But past that it's essentially an Asteroid clone.

Tori-Bash is pretty innovative for a fighting game. Free-form physics-based combat with time-slices and muscle control.

There's a god-awful lot of games with various time-control mechanics. I point this out as I can't think of any titles from the 90's to have it. Time-travel, as a theme, sure. But not as a gameplay element. I'm not sure I'm smart enough to play Achron.

And Portal, of course.

But gameplay innovation typically doesn't come from big-box AAA titles. Those companies don't like to gamble millions on something unproven. There are exceptions, like Prince of Persia and sorta-exceptions like Portal (which was an Indie game demo bought up by Valve). But you'll typically only see innovation on the "Indie game scene". Where the team and budget-size more closely resemble the game industry in the 90's.

Tropes are neither good nor bad, just tools, and as with anything else, lazy writing will make bad stories.

Now, go and play Achron and witness time travel as a plot device done right.

I'd be even more impressed if they managed to make it multiplayer. Maybe merge this with the Resequence Engine? Not for time travel necessarily, but because they've already worked out how to run multiple reference frames at once, and I suspect you'd need an event buffer for every pair of players, and possibly to introduce a preferred reference frame as well for simulating the environment.

I generally consider Starsiege: Tribes a very influential game in the FPS genre. Up until that point for the most part FPS games were rather cramped and multiplayer was rather limited in size. Tribes introduced wide open terrain, seamless transition between interior and exterior portions of a map, vehicles, and cooperative team play on an extremely large scale[1]. Games after, notably the Battlefield series picked up on this and really popularized these concepts. Even Halo was inspired partly by Tribes[2]. Today most games support these basic features, but in 1998 it was extremely impressive. I can't say for sure whether Tribes was the first to do any of this, I'm sure someone did before, but it was popular enough to grab the attention of other developers. Unfortunately it wasn't popular enough to establish a stable sub-genre which is generally called the FPS+Z genre[3]; most likely this was due to the gameplay complexity that was introduced by this game. Still, this game should make it to more top game lists.

Another game which may belong on this list in a few years is Achron which is a time traveling based RTS. I doubt this game will become largely popular, however the concept is simply fantastic and shows a lot of thought towards mixing the genre up a bit. Perhaps it shouldn't be labeled a Real Time Strategy game, perhaps Meta Time Strategy game would be more accurate.

[1]I think the max server size was 64 upon release in 1998, although it could have been 128. It's been a long time.
[2]I'd have to find the commentary. I don't remember if it was on a web site, in a magazine, or what.
[3]Tribes had a jet pack and by "skiing" players could attain incredible speeds.

No, that's just a narrative device. Time travel stories are old as the hills. I'm talking about something else entirely. . .

The guys making Acron were tuned into the same idea at the same point. Their product is on about the same release schedule as I would have been had I been a game designer, (which thankfully I'm not! Obeying your muse is hard work.)

-FL

http://achrongame.com/paradox.html

i'm more optimistic in that i think we'll see new eras of gameplay mechanisms that weren't possible before, like time travel: http://achrongame.com/