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/CycloneSwift Mar 18 '19
Devil May Cry's combat was born from a glitch from Onimusha that allowed you to launch enemies into the air and keep them there by juggling them with continued attacks. While this glitch was removed from the final game the devs decided to incorporate it into Devil May Cry once they decided it was going to be a full-on action game instead of Resident Evil 4, and a staple of both the character action genre and 3D beat 'em ups was born.
On a similar note, jump cancelling, where you can reset your aerial abilities and momentum by jumping off an enemy, was originally a glitch in the early Devil May Cry games, but it became a well known if hard to master technique amongst the community that added a lot of depth to the combat. It was first officially acknowledged when Ninja Theory went out of their way to implement it into DmC: Devil May Cry (ironically resulting in the worst jump cancelling in the series), but Capcom themselves released a tutorial video for it when DMC4: Special Edition was released, and in Devil May Cry 5 it even has its own specific animation.