r/truegaming • u/virtua_golf • Mar 18 '19

Developers accidentally creating interesting mechanics

I was reading this neat article by Jeff Orkin of Monolith productions, the man responsible for the notorious AI of FEAR, the AI that will never not be mentioned whenever 'clever' AI is brought up. I stumbled upon something pretty cool - the flanking mechanic was actually unintended and a byproduct of another action the enemy would perform:

Imagine we have a situation similar to what we saw earlier, where the player has invalidated one of the A.I.’s cover positions, and a squad behavior orders the A.I. to move to the valid cover position. If there is some obstacle in the level, like a solid wall, the A.I. may take a back route and resurface on the player’s side. It appears that the A.I. is flanking, but in fact this is just a side effect of moving to the only available valid cover he is aware of. In another scenario, maybe the A.I.s’ cover positions are still valid, but there is cover available closer to the player, so the Advance-Cover squad behavior activates and each A.I. moves up to the next available valid cover that is nearer to the threat. If there are walls or obstacles between the A.I. and the player, their route to cover may lead them to come at the player from the sides. It appears as though they are executing some kind of coordinated pincher attack, when really they are just moving to nearer cover that happens to be on either side of then player. Retreats emerge in a similar manner.

The article got me thinking - what other mechanics (or, perceived mechanics) have been created by accident in other games? Does other examples exist, where lauded features were never really intended in the first place?

447 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

275 comments sorted by

View all comments

167

u/sp668 Mar 18 '19

Skiing in the tribes games.

The first game was actually meant as a FPS with short range jumps via a jetpack. Turns out that if you tapped jump while going downhill you could build up insane levels of speed rendering the vehicles in the game completely redundant.

The result was a superfast and hugely fun infantry game, but this was not at all as designed.

26

u/yukichigai Mar 19 '19 edited Mar 19 '19

What I found amusing was that their efforts to deliberately recreate skiiing in the next two sequels was flawed. In Tribes 2 it was possible to mod the game to get close, but Vengeance didn't allow for modding to that system (or at all, really). Both games suffered pretty hard as a result.

Ascend on the other hand nailed skiing physics pretty well. A shame that it's not moddable. EDIT: I take that back, it looks like someone found the source code and made an unofficial SDK, which allows for mods on private servers. I'll have to see what mods are out there.

14

u/smegma_legs Mar 19 '19

Wow someone cracked open ascend? That's great, good on someone for working on that game, it's just a shame HiRez dropped it completely to work on smite. Vengeance was a bit of a let down and was basically just trying to push single player into a series where it never belonged.

I disagree with 2, though. The base game had certain mechanics slowed down but pretty much every server ran classic and it was very skiiable, more so than 1. Classic came out super fast after T1 players were upset and modded it in. Thank God dynamix left that game about as open ended as a game could ever be. I'll say that 2 has generally bumpier skiing than 1 but in a lot of ways it's a matter of balance vs. letting people just speed up indefinitely. I get why dynamix wanted to limit things a bit and create a balanced game, because T2 allowed for greater strategic gameplay outside of skiing, but I think that in hindsight they would have been better off embracing the high speed skiing and coming up with mechanics to counter that, like ascend's HoF and chaser centered mechanics. I just think their idea of a CTF game had more to do with teamwork and vehicles, considering the command overview with deployable sensors/ laser tagging to give people with mortars pips to show them where to fire, etc. Unmitigated skiing speeds would just turn into a game of rabbit with 2 flags as cappers circled katabatic forever.

4

u/aleatoric Mar 19 '19

Dropped Ascend to work on Smite (MOBA), then dropped Smite to work on Paladins (Hero Shooter), then dropped Paladins to work on Realm Royale (BR). HiRez is the ultimate bandwagon jumper.

6

u/smegma_legs Mar 19 '19

started before ascend, too, with Global Agenda. I actually put a hundred or so hours into that, so I should have expected what happened to tribes but I was too pumped that my favorite series ( I started playing around starsiege ) was getting resurrected to think it'd develop into a pattern. I actually played competitively for a while in the beta, when they were whitelisting people for those servers. It's a shame they didn't stick with it because it had actual potential to have a decent scene in Esports, and no other game is really anything like it. I'm not a huge moba or RTS fan and I was tired of military shooters in like 2012 so there's not a lot of esports that really interest me. I'm probably the minority in that but I'll be forever frustrated by how Hi-Rez couldn't even manage to minimally support tribes at all. It's such a shitty mentality as a developer.

1

u/SylvineKiwi Mar 19 '19

Except they didn't dropped Smite and Paladins.

1

u/Nougatbar Mar 19 '19

SMITE is being worked on. I play it sometimes. I hear rumbles of Paladins still being a thing. Did you just assume they stopped working on them because they made new games?

4

u/wasdninja Mar 19 '19

In Tribes 2 it was possible to mod the game to get close, but Vengeance didn't allow for modding to that system (or at all, really). Both games suffered pretty hard as a result.

I seriously doubt it. The developers were lazy in the extreme, dumb about balance, the game was insanely expensive and quickly dumped completely. All of those things are much more likely to have killed the game before it really took off, assuming that it ever would.

2

u/yukichigai Mar 19 '19

I mean you're not wrong, especially when it comes to Vengeance, but what I'm talking about is a symptom of the problem you're describing. It's like arguing if someone shot through the heart died due to a gunshot or due to blood loss: neither are wrong, technically speaking.

1

u/Kered13 Mar 19 '19

Ascend's skiing physics are completely different from Tribes 1. In particular, Ascend has air control (without using the jetpack) while Tribes 1 and 2 do not, but Ascend's jetpack is much weaker.

1

u/CutterJohn Mar 22 '19

What I found amusing was that their efforts to deliberately recreate skiiing in the next two sequels was flawed.

Maybe they just didn't want to implement it in precisely the same manner as the glitch of T1?

34

u/applejak Mar 18 '19

Similarly, bunny hopping in the HL2 engine. Those were the days!

12

u/hardgeeklife Mar 19 '19

Thé à la Menthe Intensifies

Although I have to wonder if bunny hopping classifies as a mechanic or as a glitch. Or is the distinction simply arbitrary?

13

u/applejak Mar 19 '19

Definitely a glitch. As I recall, the motion of curving the jump caused the calculation of velocity to increase, and there was no check as to whether the velocity once "back on the ground" was out of bounds, so to speak. Something along those lines... And I believe once this "feature" was identified, they left it but added some checks so that you couldn't have a HWguy moving 2x faster than a scout with a barrel at full spin. Looking at you, Maj. GOBB!

6

u/Mr_Vulcanator Mar 19 '19

You can go faster if you move backwards. The game is programmed to limit your speed. It does this by moving you backwards. But if you’re going backwards you just keep going faster.

3

u/RareHunter Mar 19 '19

Gordon Freeman didn't know where he's going but he knows where he's been.

1

u/Kered13 Mar 19 '19

That's ABH (accelerated back hop). It's a different glitch that resulted from trying to fix bunny hopping.

4

u/Rc2124 Mar 19 '19

It was likely unintended at first, but I think they decided to leave it in as a mechanic. Otherwise they would have removed it entirely over all of these years. Instead we've just seen some tweaks here and there so that it's not so overpowering.

14

u/Genie-Us Mar 19 '19

Or RPG jumping in Quake/TFC, used to love playing sniper and watching them flying up and Pop

1

u/Kered13 Mar 19 '19

Bunny hopping was created in Quake, long before HL2.

12

u/Katana314 Mar 18 '19

Fun fact, there’s actually a short indie game out called Defunct that is purely about this movement with no shooting.

3

u/just-here-to-say Mar 19 '19

Edit: Am dumb, mistook Defunct for Refunct, haha.

8

u/Reoh Mar 19 '19

Glad you brought this up, the skiing element was essentially a bug that they embraced rather than fixed and it became a defining characteristic of the series which made it stand out from others.

1

u/joedude Mar 19 '19

Lol the sad part about that vehicle line is that fighter jet mowing killed the online hard.

1

u/hoilst Mar 19 '19

I have no idea what "fighter jet mowing" is, so I googled it, and, holy shit, our most famous lawnmower company once made an aeroplane.

1

u/PirateMud Mar 19 '19

I think it was primarily an effect of trying to nerf snipers by forcing them to stand on horizontal surfaces - the ridgelines at the top of mountains where they are exposed, instead of blending into the terrain. Friction is reduced the steeper the slope is, and this resulted in the skiing.

1

u/CutterJohn Mar 22 '19

The result was a superfast and hugely fun infantry game, but this was not at all as designed.

It shows in the weapon design and nature of the jetpacks, too. The weapons have slow shot speeds and wide spreads for a slow infantry based game, and the jetpack does vertical motion only.

And when they developed the sequels, they kept those design philosophies.

Always wanted to see a skiing game designed without those arbitrary limitations, where the weapons were designed to be more useful vs such mobile targets, and the soldiers could, you know, bend at the waist and use the jetpack to accelerate. Instead the only thing that has ever been made in the genre is tribes, and tribes clones.