So I was thinking that occasionally you see a function in a game that is just plain nifty, but you never see it again, or if you do very rarely.
For example, years and years ago I played a MMO called Anarchy Online, and it had a really interesting combat targeting system, you hit auto attack on your target and that was "locked" in, and you'd keep attacking it until hit auto attack again or it was dead, but that's fairly common, what wasn't was the secondary target, you could select a friendly or a hostile for your secondary target and cast spells on them without loosing you main target that you were auto attacking, very useful, it had the added bonus of auto detecting the spell you were trying to cast.
For example if you had a hostile and a friendly selected and preformed a hostile action it would be done on the hostile, and if you did a friendly it would go onto the friendly.
It seems a bit fiddly, but after you got use to it, it was very good, and I've never seen it again in a number of MMOs (WoW notably) and other games with a similar style.
So what really good functions or mechanics have you see in games that never really took off despite being awesome?
For example, years and years ago I played a MMO called Anarchy Online, and it had a really interesting combat targeting system, you hit auto attack on your target and that was "locked" in, and you'd keep attacking it until hit auto attack again or it was dead, but that's fairly common, what wasn't was the secondary target, you could select a friendly or a hostile for your secondary target and cast spells on them without loosing you main target that you were auto attacking, very useful, it had the added bonus of auto detecting the spell you were trying to cast.
For example if you had a hostile and a friendly selected and preformed a hostile action it would be done on the hostile, and if you did a friendly it would go onto the friendly.
It seems a bit fiddly, but after you got use to it, it was very good, and I've never seen it again in a number of MMOs (WoW notably) and other games with a similar style.
So what really good functions or mechanics have you see in games that never really took off despite being awesome?