Attention to detail - all the small things that matter

[Fletch]

Playing through the Labyrinth course on Walkabout Mini Golf recently and if your ball plops into the bog of eternal stench it continues to stink for the remainder of the round. 

 

GTA IV has some great little touches too, I loved being able to pick up a discarded coffee cup and lob it at an NPC and causing a big old fight. 

[Captain Kelsten]

It’s simple stuff in games for me: proper crunchy snow sounds, leaving footprints or realistic trails, mirrors that actually reflect your character, sound effects that are so good and precise you can tell what’s going on without even seeing it. Things like Drake brushing his hand on stuff he passes. Decent physics on small things, so you can knock stuff over. Always annoys me when you play a game where you can shoot and you shoot cans or bottles or whatever and nothing happens. I love when you get to something in a game and have a bright idea and go “I wonder if I can…” and then you do and the devs reward you for it. 

 

Basically, everything Red Dead Redemption 2 does. As already mentioned, that game is a masterclass in “all the small things”. 

[dumpster]

In Bigscreen VR for the Oculus Quest, you watch a movie on a cinema sized screen.  There's a tiny detail that is so tiny you don't even notice it but it sells the illusion of the cinema being a room.  Like, you know in your mind that everything you are seeing is a computer generated scene and you're looking at a small screen in front of you... But the illusion of a real cinema is the way the room itself illuminates based on what's on the screen.  Just like in the real cinema, you can see the chairs around you and the other people that much easier when the movie scene is daytime.  Plunge into night time and the room is much darker.  And it's so real and subtle that you don't think about it, but it sells the illusion that you're in a room.  Honestly. The quest 2 blows me away.  

 

While we are at it, I'll spoiler tag this one in case you've not seen the scene before.  Have a look at this greatness. 

 

 

 

Now watch it again and look at Val Kilmers head at 19 seconds in.  That's what makes the joke work.  The whole thing is so convincing and smooth because Val Kilmers did that with his head.  That's attention to detail. 

 

 

 

 

[dumpster]

By the way, if you want to try this Bigscreen thing, sit on the front row then turn around and look at the back wall.  You won't have been aware at how the whole room is basically flashing but now you've noticed it, you'll see how, as you watch the movies your room is basically lighting up and getiing darker all the time, but the real ambience makes it invisible.

[Triple A]

The angle at which/side that you approach chests in FF7 Remake, determines which hand Cloud will open them with.

[Made of Ghosts]

Always really liked in BOTW how the NPCs run for cover when it starts raining. 

[dumpster]

I've captured the Bigscreen ambience with an extreme example, but in the headset this is so realistic that you just don't notice.  If you sit at the front and have the screen behind you, it's madly obvious, but in normal use it isn't noticable at all, yet adds to the realism and atmosphere.

 

 

 

[Alan Stock]

1 hour ago, Triple A said:

The angle at which/side that you approach chests in FF7 Remake, determines which hand Cloud will open them with.

 

In Xenoblade Chronicles 3 when you open a big container it takes 2 random teammates turning a lever each. A neat detail is the strong characters just use one hand to turn the lever but the weaker characters use both hands. 

[DeciderVT]

21 hours ago, Wiper said:

The mention of Ridge Racer's "evidence of life"* put me in mind of another racing game: I remember being really impressed by the fact that in Metropolis Street Racer, as you went through a tunnel not only would car noise reverberate (impressive enough at the time), but the in-game radio would cut out. Just a little thing, but really helped sell the idea that you were there. If I remember correctly, it even went so far as to not do that if you were using the game's virtual CD player (i.e. a custom playlist of in-game songs).

 

Extreme-G 2 did something similar- it was possible for your bike to go so fast that you'd break the sound barrier. When that happened you'd hear a sonic boom and the BGM would drop out:

 

 

[Phantoon]

21 hours ago, Rayn said:

The castle soundtrack in The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds is the same as the castle soundtrack in The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, but backwards.

And it has 4 different versions depending on which part of the dungeon you're in, with Ganon's theme being added more and more to the mix.

[Broker]

In Destiny, if you’re using a hand cannon and you press the trigger in half way the hammer on the gun starts pulling back. If you let go it moves back into position without firing the shot. 

 

In GTAIV, if you’ve got the radio on and a call I’d coming in it briefly makes that interference sound that you used to hear when phone signals messed with speakers. 

 

In BOTW if you’re opening a little chest Link kicks it instead of doing it with his hand. If you’re barefoot he does the same but grabs his foot afterwards because it hurts him. 

 

The king though is Max Payne 3. The animation on people realistically falling down stairs. The way he holds his guns to reload. The ruined offices after a gunfight. 

[Nick R]

18 hours ago, b00dles said:

Speaking of rain, one of the laziest and bad details that I still see occasionally is the "raining indoors" when there's clearly some kind of filter put on to stimulate rain but they miss a hit box or whatever and you're in a building or tunnel and yet are being rained on still.

 

I realise I'm sort of posting things from the wrong end of the point of the thread so I'll stop that.

 

18 hours ago, T Pot said:

I always remember on MSR on the DC when you went through tunnels your radio would turn to static. That was cool.

 

I always loved that detail in MSR too. But I have to point out that although the radio cuts out, it is one of those games where tunnels don't stop the rainfall!

[DeciderVT]

One game that is a standout for environmental details is Gone Home, which is a love letter to the 90s. You spend the whole game sifting through the belongings of an absent family and it's the little details that sell the fact it's set in 1995- not just the SNES cartridges lying around, but the riot grrl fanzines you find in your teenage sister's room, or the TV guide:

 

 

It really makes the house feel like a home that's been lived in, instead of a collection of assets thrown together to form an environment.

[Rayn]

1 hour ago, Broker said:

The king though is Max Payne 3. The animation on people realistically falling down stairs. The way he holds his guns to reload. The ruined offices after a gunfight. 

 

Speaking of Max Payne, in the first game when riding an elevator it plays some muzak. If you look up and shoot the speaker, Max says "Thank you"

[phresh]

The way the music faded out the higher you jump in Excite Truck. Such a small feature but massively amplified the feeling of distance from the track.

[Nick R]

In Sonic 3, Sonic's idle animation ends with him pointing his hands in the direction he's facing, as if urging the player to keep moving.

 

At the end of Sonic & Knuckles's Hidden Palace Zone, there's a cutscene where control is taken away from you, you fall down a pit, and you regain control. At this point, if you don't touch anything, the timing of Sonic going into his idle animation is timed so that his pointing action happens at the exact moment that Knuckles smashes the wall to the left. (2:15 to 2:30 in the video below.)

 

 

I don't know if they always planned that animation to sync with the cutscene as far back as when the two games were planned to be one, or if they created the animation for Sonic 3 then when making S&K they tuned the timing of the cutscene to match it. But whether it was intentional or serendipitous, I always appreciated the way the actions lined up!

[JoeK]

Whilst it's engine has aged a little over the years, Half-Life 2 remains a high watermark as far as incidental details are concerned.

 

God knows how many times I've run through the game over the years, but I always found something new just slightly off the beaten track to make smile at the effort the folks at Valve made.

 

-Joining up with Alyx at Black Mesa East, and her telling you about Ravenholm. 'We don't go there anymore'. But if you inch closer and closer to the sealed entrance, she'll tell you a few other little nuggets of info too. 

 

-Kliner's lab - bloody shedloads of silly little things in there to play around with, but also the newspaper clippings on the wall, telling you about what happened to the world.

 

-Dog. Never has something that looked such a complete opposite of its name, but actually really is a doggie in behaviour. 

 

Tons of other stuff of course. Wonderful game.

 

[Rayn]

If you deal 69 dmg points to an enemy in Borderlands 3, your character will chuckle. 

 

I don't know why I find that amusing, but I do. 

[pledge]

For those in the industry, are some of these things added as kind of intern projects as well as devs just wanting a bit of fun? Things like games including fishing or other mini-games always strike me as something done as a learning task for someone.

[Alan Stock]

In my experience its usually just passionate devs putting in little touches as a bonus. Sometimes folks will just put them in without any prompting when they are doing the final touches to a feature. I've had quite a few cases when I was in game dev, where as a designer I'd work with a programmer or artist and they'd add some neat little detail to a feature we were working on. In other cases little touches like this get added at the end of the project. When a game's in the near final stages of testing you'll find a bunch of devs who may have the free time to add extra polish, which usually is welcomed unless it has any grave implications for Q.A. 

[SMD]

if there's a cat in the game and i can't pet it, i don't want to play the game

[dataDave]

On 15/08/2022 at 19:18, Rayn said:

Water droplets on the screen when raining/interacting with water in MGS2. To my memory, this was the first time I saw this effect, at least as convincingly and it also blew my mind. 

Stunt Race FX was my first time seeing this. It also had weather and time of day cycles. I love that game so much.

[meatbin]

MGSV - when using the iDroid, as you navigate left right up down through the menus, that action corresponds to Snake thumbing the jog wheel/switch on the right of the physical iDroid device.

[Rayn]

I don’t know if this one is true but a co-worker told me that in Luigis Mansion 3, whenever you get close to one of the Big Boos the controller will start to vibrate in pulses, spelling B O O in morse. 
As I don’t know morse it’s a detail that went over my head when I played it but it’s a cool detail if true.

[Captain Kelsten]

I started playing Deep Rock Galactic yesterday (if you’re unaware, it’s a 4 person co-op looter shooter space dwarf mining simulator mixed with starship troopers and left 4 dead…sort of) and you have this base, the space rig.
 

The rig feels like a proper gritty, grotty, lived in mining base and littered throughout are terminals you can access for your equipment, cosmetics, upgrades etc. (There’s also a bar, a dance floor and jukebox and a barrel kicking mini game). The place feels real, daft as that sounds. There’s tools and beer cans strewn about the place, everything is smudged and dirty, there’s bits of mining equipment piled here and there, most of it broken. It feels like a shithole space station that a greedy intergalactic mining company paid as little as possible for to keep it from falling apart and you’re living on it
 

And really all it is, when you think about it, is an interactive menu. In any other game, all those terminals would just be tabs on a pause menu but here, they’re built into the world in a believable way as physical things you can interact with and it’s a wonderful bit of world building.  
 

Even the season pass is a terminal you go and interact with and, because you’re a lowly dwarf miner working for a corrupt organisation, it’s not called season pass, it’s called your seasonal performance review. Again, a small thing but it builds the season pass into the game world as an actual thing that makes sense, rather than just a random menu. 
 

The only other game I can think of that tried something like this (but nowhere near as well) was Fable 3. There it felt like a pain to get what you needed but in Deep Rock Galactic it’s actually fun running about the rig. 

[Keyboard Koala]

Apparently all members of the Zora royal family have names related to the standard musical scale. 

 

Dorephan; Mifa; Zora (sol-la); Sidon.

[df0]

Well covered by different media outlets, but the skeletons in the Fallout franchise. Telling a story with objects and positioning.

[Wiper]

My main takeaway from the 3D Fallouts' skeletons was the opposite: they were overt to the point of coming across as contrived, signposting the environment storytellers' designs rather than using subtle details to allow the player to figure things out for themselves. I'm not sure I'd consider them examples of either "small things" or "attention to detail"!

 

One little touch I do remember liking in Fallout 4, though, is when you exit the first vault it depressurises slightly; mostly demonstrated by having translucent dust turbulence around the door, but also by having the small stack of papers that are near the vault door get sucked through the moment it's open a crack. Tricky to find a clip that shows it properly, but you can at least see them fly through in this one at around the 1:50 mark:

 

 

A simple little touch that really sells the pressure differential.

[ZOK]

Cyberpunk 2077 is all detail everywhere all the time.

[Rayn]

I love it when there's stuff happening when you're idle. Wether it's Sonic tapping his foot while looking annoyed at the screen or Mario falling asleep in Mario 64 or even when Duke Nukem is asking you if you're waiting for christmas, it's a great little addition that makes some games more alive and wholesome.