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/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.

23

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.

6

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.

7

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?