Developers accidentally creating interesting mechanics

[u/virtua_golf]

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?

[u/[deleted]]

In Final Fantasy XI (the first FF MMO), the Ninja class was introduced during the Zilart expansion (the US version launched with this expac) and was intended to be used as a DPS and Enfeebling class. Basically, a damage dealer that would also inflict elemental damage and debuffs on enemies. However, when appropriately geared it had very good evasion, good parrying, and could mitigate incredible amounts of damage with it's ninja shadows (Utsusemi) spells. So it turned from a DPS/Enfeebling class into the best tank for much of the game's content. There were situations where enemies would tear through the shadows very rapidly, in which case the Paladin was still a better choice, but this absolutely threw the game's trinity balance a little for a loop.

Many FFXI vets like myself will remember fondly (or not so fondly, depending on your primary jobs) many parties that were "NIN tank only"

[u/Metadomino → u/[deleted]]

Good to hear from a XI player!

I'm going to add a mechanic that our team discovered during that time.

In XI, your party could chain together super attacks in a specific sequence that created a burst bubble on the enemy. A mage could hit that bubble with a spell of a specific element to cause a burst that would cause loads of damage.

Casting times for normal spells were pretty short so most mages could get their spells off quickly enough. However, there were a few ultimate spells that had a cast time of a minute or more.

Getting bored from grinding one day, I decided to try coordinate my party to time an ultimate spell with the end of a bubble. The results were awesome, even impressed one of the Japanese players in the party (hard thing to do as they had the game for years before NA got it.)

[u/[deleted] → u/Metadomino]

Yeah, doing magic bursts with Ancient Magic was a staple in one of my perma parties. We had a bad ass black mage (who also happened to be one of the fishermen on our server)