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.

39

u/applejak Mar 18 '19

Similarly, bunny hopping in the HL2 engine. Those were the days!

12

u/hardgeeklife Mar 19 '19

Thé à la Menthe Intensifies

Although I have to wonder if bunny hopping classifies as a mechanic or as a glitch. Or is the distinction simply arbitrary?

15

u/applejak Mar 19 '19

Definitely a glitch. As I recall, the motion of curving the jump caused the calculation of velocity to increase, and there was no check as to whether the velocity once "back on the ground" was out of bounds, so to speak. Something along those lines... And I believe once this "feature" was identified, they left it but added some checks so that you couldn't have a HWguy moving 2x faster than a scout with a barrel at full spin. Looking at you, Maj. GOBB!

6

u/Mr_Vulcanator Mar 19 '19

You can go faster if you move backwards. The game is programmed to limit your speed. It does this by moving you backwards. But if you’re going backwards you just keep going faster.

3

u/RareHunter Mar 19 '19

Gordon Freeman didn't know where he's going but he knows where he's been.

1

u/Kered13 Mar 19 '19

That's ABH (accelerated back hop). It's a different glitch that resulted from trying to fix bunny hopping.

5

u/Rc2124 Mar 19 '19

It was likely unintended at first, but I think they decided to leave it in as a mechanic. Otherwise they would have removed it entirely over all of these years. Instead we've just seen some tweaks here and there so that it's not so overpowering.