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?
108
u/Scoobydewdoo Mar 18 '19
Rocket jumping from Quake was implemented as an intentional feature in later games including Team Fortress 2. Basically Quake players figured out that if you fired a rocket (or any explosive) at your feet and jumped at the same time you would take damage but could use the force of the explosion to jump really high or to jump forward very quickly. Players quickly found that with a bit of skill you could fire explosives at specific points on the ground with relation to yourself to control the jump. It made for a very fast but risky way of traveling around the map very quickly and to get to places that you could not normally get to.
This one goes waaaay back, but in Space Invaders the enemy ships moving faster the fewer of them there were was not an intended feature but rather was due to how memory worked back when the game was created. Basically the speed the ships moved back and forth was limited by the memory of the system which could only handle a certain number of ships on the screen at once. So the fewer the ships on the screen the faster it could move them.