I agree with the sentiment here, but the bigger issue is most games may not have a cool unique new thing that is communicable to listeners. Considering most games take at least a year to create, they usually stumble upon at least a few innovative, but small, ideas. Looking back at a game like Halo, probably the coolest feature was the ability to only hold two weapons at a time, a nowadays popular design choice which radically alters gameplay balance. However if you had told me before release that was the "killer feature", I would have been bored and uninterested.
Agreed. You just touched on one of the oddest quirks in psychology as well. People don't like to have their options taken away. But at the same time they don't want to think about the options they have.
So even though only having two weapons at a time is arguably a killer feature, it would be almost impossible to convince someone that this is true. Another example might be Apple, every time they take away an option and people complain they are arguably making their product better, but theres no way they can convince people that's true.
If people don't know they have an option they usually don't care about it or put up with any inconvenience.
MDK2 (released in March of 2000) had you play a third of the levels as a four-armed anthropomorphic dog and respectively let you hold four weapons at the same time. The gameplay balance they were going for was similar to Serious Sam, I think... i.e. everybody dies in large numbers (except you, occasionally). Actually, that game was made up almost exclusively of cool new features, go play it. The fact that one of the best third-person shooters/adventures was produced by BioWare of all companies still blows my mind a bit.
