Please people, help me out with this, which game popularized any modern game to be a huge ass open world action RPG?
My best bet is that it is The Witcher 3's fault.
Probably any Bethesda game
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_(video_game)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_(video_game)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angband_(video_game)
Depends on how you constrain that idea. Open worlds were a very early idea, but old computers were somewhat capacity limited in how much content you could have.
Been around since at least early Final Fantasy / Chrono Trigger SNES era (for some values of action). Maybe Atari 'Adventure'.
People always forget that resident evil 4(? There is a million of them) made third person shooters mainstream.
What are you smoking? That's like a 2005 game.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-person_shooter
Jonathan S. Harbour of the University of Advancing Technology argues that Tomb Raider (1996) by Eidos Interactive (now Square Enix Europe) is "largely responsible for the popularity of this genre".
Hell, Max Payne was definitely more popular, and it came out in 2001.
Crush the Castle inspired Angry Birds and several other games with the same catapult mechanic. Loved that flash game way before Angry Birds was put on the App Store.
Arma 2-3 have been responsible for at least 3 major multiplayer genres.
Ocarina of Time is the mother of modern 3D gaming with Z-targeting.
Battlefield 1942 introduced rideable vehicles to the maps.
Halo introduced regenerating health.
WASD + mouse aim in FPS. Wolf3d, Doom1 and Blakestone used the arrow keys, spacebar and Ctrl back in the day. The arrows were turn, not strafe too.
I reckon it was some friends of mine in the 90s in Box Hill, Melbourne, Victoria who were the first to use WASD/mouse aim. Share house above a shop at the end of a tram line.
Quake 1 popularized mouselook
I'm not 100% sure if factorio was the first, but the devs at Wube certainly perfected the idea and now there's a whole market for the "factory game" genre.
Souls games. Popularized invasions.
Perfect example that "popularized" is different from "popular".
Don’t know if this counts, but Resident Evil 4 killed off the tank controls and single-handedly popularised third person cameras for survival horror games.
Resident Evil 4 still had tank controls, but it moved the camera behind the back. Unlike dual analog third person shooters at the time, it did have one major innovation: it moved the character to the left side of the screen so you could more easily see what's in front of you.
I think Halo was what popularized the twin stick controls.
Dune II - basically the grandfather of every RTS game out there (and incidentally very, very different from Dune I): opposing forces, resource collection, tech tree, fog of war, et cetera. Or perhaps it was (not World of) Warcraft, it's been too long and memory gets fuzzy.
Metroid, which spawned more than half of all indie games.
funny how no one even mentioned World of Warcraft for MMOs because it's too obvious.
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