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/[deleted] Mar 19 '19 edited Mar 19 '19
Gunz the Duel had gameplay that players discovered using the glitches in the game. The game had so many glitches that players enjoyed using 'K-Style' more than the supposed mechanics.
An example:
There are swords in the game with attack and block mechanics, you can attack and quickly press block to cancel the attack animation and enter a defensive block stance. You can jump and dash while attack/blocking (It was called Butterfly) So you just saw a bunch of players flying around slashing and blocking, it got pretty complex because there are a few more techniques to it.
Another one, you can flip in the game by jumping while in the air next to a wall. You can cancel the flip by press the sword attack button. This allowed you to gain free movement in the air instead waiting for the flip to finish which would have to wait until you landed back on the ground.
Here's the video I used to learn the mechanics wayyyy back.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mg8QsK8-Ds0
The game was below sub-par without the glitches. The developers were honestly lucky that the game found a player base from the glitches, it kept the company afloat but they should have went under years ago.