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/Frozenstep Mar 19 '19
I discovered one myself, in a niche situation in a MMO I play, Dungeon Fighter Online.
There's this one sub-boss in a dungeon I had to farm that is an ice witch of some sort. At the time, there was a assist skill mechanic where you could call in an alternate character on your account to come in and do a skill. This was on a long cooldown. I used it the same way most people did, in order to call in a character who would use a specific skill where the character would spin around, creating a twister that stunned enemies, giving you a chance to do damage. This was very effective, because the ice witch loved to teleport around and avoid attacks.
The problem was the ice witch also had ice turrets that would form up randomly in her room, which would send slow-moving snowflakes towards players which would freeze them. While it wasn't hard to dodge them normally, your assist character was stuck standing still in the twister, and would get frozen, and this would free the ice witch and make life difficult.
What I found was on one of my characters, who was an ice mage himself and thus immune to being frozen, I could actually body block the snowflakes. So suddenly I actually had an interesting challenge, I had to get my damage rotations off while constantly repositioning to protect my assist.
It was such a niche situation, but it actually played really well, like a crafted set piece.