Make sure your projects don’t get trapped by these common game features that aren’t necessary anymore.

As games advance ever-onward into technology, we’ve put a lot of effort into updating things like physics, textures, and animation. However, with our eyes set on the most obvious updates, we tend to overlook a lot of things we've accepted as unquestionable in their relevance and need in a game. Here are a few things that still appear in games, but are long past their expiration date:

1. Save Points
Back when games were cartridge based, saving a game was a manual action - you were prompted after levels or between stages to remember to actively save your progress. As games became less level-oriented and moved to media like memory cards, save points started appearing to operate as a more seamless way of saving progress manually without disrupting a certain level of immersion.

It's important to remember that all of this was done because of limitations in technology - if the games could have saved in real time, or through different courses, they probably would have. Now that they can, it's strange to me to still see floating orbs and other obvious distractions scattered through otherwise realistic worlds.

There is a counter argument to this, of course - sometimes you don’t want to save. Schools of people are just looking to blow that Hero ranking in infamous in one forgettable rampage. Other times, you want to be able to go back to different areas. I, for one, prize my delicately plotted Xenosaga saves that mark each noteworthy cutscene in the game.

2. Cut scenes
Another break in immersion - cut scenes take control out of the player’s hands and suspend the reality of the game while characters act out decisions that the player may or may not have made. Bioshock handles this elegantly by playing out elaborate scenes without grabbing control. Sure, you could walk away while Andrew Ryan explains his master plan, but with the right amount of direction, you won’t.

3. HUDs
While stylish Heads Up Displays have become mainstays in certain genres like RPGs, any game attempting to create a life-like world not reliant on math-driven attacks can find ways to tuck information away into the environment without having constant reminders floating around the screen in the form of text. For instance, when real people want to check how much money they have, they open their wallet, or check their balance on their phone - I’ve yet to meet someone who had the total constantly floating at the top right of their line of vision. It may take more button presses to get there, but the added realism of “going through the motions” can be rewarding if the inconvenience is still less than the annoyance of in-game detractors.

4. Invisible walls
If I'm going to encounter areas I’m not allowed to enter, there needs to be a reason. It could be as simple as, “Hey, that’s someone’s home. You can’t just walk in.” to a giant demon overlord guarding the gate. Either way, if a city or environment is supposed to be perceived as real, you can’t excuse entire worlds as out of reach by a low line of rocks anyone could easily hop over. In a recent interview, Bioshock Infinite’s director of product development Timothy Gerritsen elaborated on this idea of video game streets. “If you’re going to make a street it needs to feel real, and have a real market and people living in there living convincing lives. I want to know how they’ll move about, and if there’s a way for them to get to their apartment from the sidewalk, and a reason for an alley to be where it is."

This speaks not just to level design, but to any aspect of building a game – whether you’re still attending video game design online schools or starting careers after earning degrees, we have the tools to make a living, breathing world, but it’s easy to get tripped up in conventions we're used to in gaming past. Every time you start a new project, take a look at it to make sure you’re not arbitrarily boxing yourself in to conventions the industry has outgrown.