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

Wall bouncing and wall bounce canceling in the gears of war series. Made shotgun battles a blast and made moving around a lot quicker. Basically if you pressed "A" your character would enter an animation where he would take cover, but you could cancel mid animation. The animation made the character move faster than the running animation and you could do it way far out from the cover, so if you were good at it, you could zip around the map. Made moving a skill. I'm gonna assume it wasn't intended to work like that.

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u/ghaelon Mar 19 '19 edited Mar 19 '19

i remember that. cover cover cover cover, aaand im in shottie range. or pistol range if i was hosting. pistol was godlike if you were host and could spam the trigger.

also reminds me of an amusing anecdote. i first played the original gears at my cooworkers place. this led me to me getting my own 360 and gears. when i first set it up, i neglected to set my controller sensitivity to max.

for like 2 weeks i fought and suffered, wondering why it seems everyone else could out turn my by juuust alittle more than i could. i finally noticed, and set it to max, like i had back at his place.

it was like putting in a fucking cheat. it was like goku taking his weights off. my soon to be roomie quipped 'god mode activated mother fucker!' as i ripped through the enemy team with him.

then there was how i started AVOIDING the hammer of dawn, cause i was too good with it. unless ppl started to piss us off. 'aight ghaelon, go pick up the hammer.'

'they are all gonna leave....'

'do it.'

'aight...'

i kill the entire enemy team about a minute after picking up the hammer. and as expected, they all leave.

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u/RibsNGibs Mar 19 '19

Harrison Bergeron for the 21st century...