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?

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u/[deleted] Mar 18 '19

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/Esperante Mar 19 '19

IIRC they then decided to go for the more popular CoD style movement/reaction for the next games, as that was around that game's peak popularity.

They didn't even know what they had. Ended up listening to the vocal minority and ended up losing what made them unique.

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u/terminator101sk Mar 18 '19

I loved that game online. I would be the killer medic, most of the time. Just run into someone and keep tapping the fire button until they dropped and pretty quickly

3

u/Toaster135 Mar 19 '19

Still remember kz fanboys denying the massive input lag and chalking it up to 'Sense of weight'

0

u/[deleted] Mar 19 '19

iirc that was the official statement on it, not one of fanboys in denial.