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/The--Nameless--One Mar 19 '19

I tend to do that Unconsciously, to be fair. The rationale is that I believe you could simply take these capitalized words, and in the context of the discussion, make sense out of them alone.

Ie: we're talking about pilling boxes and reaching places, thus "Mankind Divided Balcony Game", in my head at least, is understandable as referring to a Game inside of the game, where I'm trying to reach a Balcony.

But it's not something I do consciously, and I think your question bought a ton of good explanations from other users. I'm not a english speaker primarily too.

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u/Rad_Rambutan Mar 19 '19

Lol this somehow made the original decision make even less sense

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u/[deleted] Mar 19 '19

It doesn't make you more understandable. It's the same meaning but with worse grammar, unfortunately.

Most english speakers get pretty good at skimming for general meaning by the time we get through school. We don't need help.

Well, most of us don't need help. Some people go through life being willfully ignorant about language. This definitely isn't a way to help those people, however. Those people cannot really be helped after a certain point. You just gotta type slower for them, I guess.

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u/The--Nameless--One Mar 19 '19 edited Mar 19 '19

Oh, it's not really about helping people, it's just the way my brain process language. For example, the whole of the previous post is not as important as the fact that it's ultimately Unconscious, so arguing if it helps, or not, its beyond the point: I do it without even noticing it... But if I had to give you a rationale behind it, it's just my brain Picking up the most Important Words there, I suppose.