Has a game ever made you go wow?

Metal Gear Solid and Gran Turismo 3 i think. The first Halo trailer also had an effect on me.

Seeing a sunset in world of warcraft in the Barrens in the beta.

Playing Quake for the first time

First time playing against a real person in Total Annihilation/Boneyards.

The opening moment of Forza Horizon 3 and 4 is the one I always think of whenever this question is raised. Pure undiluted joy and euphoria, and I would say racing games wouldn't even rank amongst my favourite genres.

Soul Caliber on the Dreamcast - going from Unreal and Half Life to SC was a huge leap.

Half Life 2 - the interactivity with objects in the game along with the graphics, paired with the long wait for it to come out. It felt special.

VR - HL Alyx and SW Squadrons. There were levels in Alyx I could not play by myself. While I was a bit meh on Squadrons as a game, it made me feel like I was sitting in an A wing, and that made inner ten year old me happy as a clam.

World of Warcraft - I find it funny when folks pine for the days when wow was hard. Compared to Everquest, WoW was ez mode. It made mmo’s accessible. It had a sense of scale, wonder, and discovery with minimal load screens. It made you feel powerful from the get go.

4 player Doom on a multinode BBS at 56k.

The BF1942 Wake Island demo. The scale, the vehicles, the number of players, the chaos.

Metal Gear Solid - that game blew my teenage mind. The perfect balance of dumb 90’s action movie and anime with voice acting that was beyond anything in that era.

Doom - the very first time a level I made in Doom CAD worked. There was no youtube, or web pages, just trial and error and books at the grocery store that ten year old me read.

Street Fighter 2 Turbo on the SNES. In my mind’s eye, someone brought the arcade home. No more riding my bike three miles to dump five bucks worth of quarters into a machine.

Each new expansion of WoW makes me go wow.
When you get to explore new maps for the first time you pay attention and discover amazing vistas and little details.
Later on you just run past everything and just do that WQ.

@gwms001:

Yep, especially the vault thing for me. It made me want to explore every nook and cranny in that world.

Most recent I can really recall would be God of War (the new one) - I just adored that game but the imagery and graphics just had a lot of wow moments for me.

the first time playing Tetris Effect in VR when the tunes start pumping and the once black background is full of crazy neon space whales

The individual melting ice cubes on the tanker in MGS2

My main character actually dying before the game is even fully over in RDR

I didn't see it, but I feel I need to mention the wow-factor of WoW.
It has wowed me on many occasions over the last decade+

The last 15 minutes of INSIDE.

A few formative games on the Apple II:

1) The Bard's Tale

2) Wizardy

3) Zork II

3) Trinity

This was back when games -- like stories, like tabletop RPGs -- really required you invoke your imagination to enrich and complete the experience.

Visual and audio experiences can bring sensory immersion, but not the kind of complete engagement that I remember feeling with these basic, text-based games of my youth.

EDIT: (By the way, I appreciate this thread for taking my mind off the absolutely shitty state of my country, if even for a few moments. Hashtag go vote, and all that.)

I will give an example which is probably pretty pedestrian, but impressed me at the time.

It was the big twist in System Shock 2. How they did it knocked me back a little. Literally killing the lights, and the visage of Who was really running the show looming over the protagonist, and then declaring in 'her' unique many-voices, a few male, and time and pitch variated,

'I AM SHODAN'.

For a game that looks pretty primitive in it's game art now, it was very effective for me.

I get wowed at great mechanics.

Ori 2, Titanfall 2, and Rocket League give me that sensation.

When moving in a game feels great and you are just gushing with joy

Playing the first Gears of War on 360 with a friend at his place in split-screen co-op. That got me pretty hype for the 7th generation of systems; mainly the 360 of course since there was no way that my parents would buy me a $600 console.

Playing though Metal Gear Solid 4 for the first time back in 2010, which was the year that I finally got a PS3.

Building my first PC in 2015. A Celeron G1840, 4GBs of RAM and a 750 Ti wasn't much in terms of power, but it got me into PC gaming.

How Need For Speed 2015 blended the cars and environments with the actors in the FMVs. Sure, the illusion is broken when you can piece together how those scenes are composited (or lower the graphics settings), but I'm still impressed with the game's presentation.

Playing as the Ikkitousen characters in Senran Kagura: Estival Versus. The emotional roller coaster of those characters being exclusive to Japan to having them available alongside the launch of the Steam version was pretty real.

And switching over to a 21:9 monitor last year. I won't complain when a game mainly/only supports 16:9, but I'm still impressed when a game and it's pre-rendered cutscenes fill my screen, especially after playing the game with a standard 16:9 screen for an extended amount of time.

Too many times to count, frankly. But some key moments that stand out, in no particular order:

Super Metroid: When the baby comes in at the last moment to save your life, and the subsequent sacrifice/revenge against Mother Brain.

Final Fantasy III/VI: Playing through the end of the world for the first time and realizing the game was only half done, if that. I mean... they let the villain win—I'd never seen that before in a game.

Final Fantasy XII: Coming to the fight with Yiazmat without realizing what was about to happen or what I was in for, and beating him in a total battle of attrition.

Symphony of the Night: Just... every new piece of music. That soundtrack is lightning in a bottle.

Breath of the Wild: When you first run out onto the plateau and see the world laid out in front of you; when you encounter the dragons just out in the world and eventually realize that they are, in a fashion, this world's representation of the triforce; when you enter Hyrule Castle and the music and tone shifts, and the sky darkens and becomes increasingly apocalyptic the higher you go; when you see Ganon for the first time and face off against him; when the guardians join together; the aesthetics, tone, and scale of that entire final fight, up to the point where Zelda just eviscerates him (every bit of this game feels like it was made by a team with something to prove).

Mass Effect 2: Going into the Omega 4 relay.

Mass Effect 3: The Leviathan DLC and seeing all the pieces slot together.

Horizon: The environments, mostly. Seeing a pristine night sky for the first time.

Thumper: Literally everything about this game—I'm synaesthetic, love horror, and have played in rhythm sections my entire life, so this game feels, quite literally, made for me.

Shadow of the Colossus: I mean almost all of this game, but especially the fifth, thirteenth, and final colossi. The thirteenth remains the best Zelda boss fight never in a Zelda game.

The Last Guardian: The entire final sequence—whether or not you like the game, the emotional payoff at the end of that game was, for me, worth the decade-plus wait. By the end, I believed Trico was a creature with its own mind and agency, and the very last shot absolutely made me tear up.

Soma: The entire game. It is the game I would have written were I ever in that position.

Mario Odyssey: The Festival. Had me grinning ear to ear like a child again.

Outer Wilds: I don't even know where to begin with this one. The game is wall-to-wall moments of awe and discovery. That said, more than any horror game I've played, the ending of this game—the lightning field and everything within that sequence—unnerved me like nothing else. Also, a genuinely gorgeous ending—that art and community are what you need to make a universe.

Sayonara Wild Hearts: The ending sequence, revisiting every confrontation and finding catharsis in place of conflict. It didn't so much awe me as it did make it all come together in a way I did not expect.

Uncharted 2: The entirety of the train sequence.

Uncharted 3: The horseback/caravan sequence.

Uncharted 4: The jeep sequence.

The Last of Us: The giraffes.

The Last of Us Part II: The space flight/birthday sequence; the ride through the burning village.

Oh, and the final sequence of Journey. I mean most of that game, but especially the post-collapse-in-the-snow/heaven sequence.

Last game I remember making me go wow was inFamous Second Son which I got along with my PS4 and the higher framerate and graphical fidelity was a real like “wow now THIS looks next-gen!”

Guess this thread was a bit old, though not *that* ancient.

There has been plenty of moments, but the first one that comes to mind is Max Payne. It's a great game as a whole, but using bullet-time™ for the very first time was mindblowing back then.

Too add to my previous list: Either Cyberpunk for living up to my significantly more humble expectations. Nioh 2 for best the best versions of Demon's Souls and Ninja Gaiden. Or Succubus because I'm an edgelord.

Oh man, can’t believe I missed this thread last year. I have so many!

Walking out of the sewers in Oblivion is what made games my favorite hobby.

Slipping between one of the moving panels in The Clockwork Mansion level in Dishonored 2 and being able to explore its inner workings.

Smashing the window in Prey.

The Labyrinth in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey.

The final boss fight against Leshey in the opening act of Inscryption.

The Anor Londo reveal in Dark Souls.

Going to Mexico and the final title card in Red Dead Redemption.

The frost dragon fight in Breath of the Wild.

Most of the needledrops in Saints Row The Third.

The VTOL mission in San Andreas.

Setting fire to something for the first time in Far Cry 2.

The part in Stanley Parable where the narrator makes a new game for you to play.

I could probably keep going for a while. I love it when games give me this feeling.

God of War (4). The first time Jormungandr rises up and bellows in your face, i had my speakers WAY to high. To this day i have never heard a sound like that coming from anything alive, dead or imaginary

Not trying to pull the old man card, but when I first saw Pong and then Atari (plus the myriad weird consoles out at that time) my mind was so blown by the concept of interacting with your TV that I got annoyed that other people weren't as blown away.

I remember firing a water arrow at a torch in Thief: Deadly Shadows and that actually being a mechanic in the game was very impressive to me.

It may not be part of gameplay but seeing the opening cinematic for World of Warcraft was impressive even for Blizzard standards at the time.

As far as gameplay, Uncharted 2 was a bunch of 'wow' moments put in one package.

Over the years many games have made me say wow. Be it a wonderfully rendered vista in a games landscape or just a shocking revelations in a story.

As far back as the orginal Tomb Raider on PS, I was saying, "Wow. Will you look at that!"

Being able to play Final Fantasy VII Remake for the first time was an almost orgasmic experience for me. The combination of nostalgia and being so utterly mind-blown by the technical achievement in the visuals and gameplay might have been the last true WOW moment I've had in gaming. Of course, there were issues, but they were not anything that I noticed during my play time (except for THAT DOOR). Listening to the remixed music and trying to discover the new story elements and contrast them to what I remembered all those years ago when I was a kid... that was a feeling like no other.

...I'm praying that they don't fumble the bag on part 2.

Alot of games, for various reasons.

Shadow of the Colossus

Ico

Journey

Two Brothers

Outer Wilds

the Witness

Elden Ring

FF7/FF7R

The whole MGS series

Pretty much every FF game, now that I think about it.

Xenoblade Chronicles

Xenogears

All of Naughty Dog's output, including the Jak & Daxter games

God of War 1-3 and 2018

and so on and so forth ...

No Man's Sky

The first time I saw the Glowing Sea in Fallout 4.

When you reach The Calm Lands in FFX.

@spike121: You reminded me...leaving the vault in Fallout 3