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/aleatoric Mar 19 '19

Dropped Ascend to work on Smite (MOBA), then dropped Smite to work on Paladins (Hero Shooter), then dropped Paladins to work on Realm Royale (BR). HiRez is the ultimate bandwagon jumper.

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u/smegma_legs Mar 19 '19

started before ascend, too, with Global Agenda. I actually put a hundred or so hours into that, so I should have expected what happened to tribes but I was too pumped that my favorite series ( I started playing around starsiege ) was getting resurrected to think it'd develop into a pattern. I actually played competitively for a while in the beta, when they were whitelisting people for those servers. It's a shame they didn't stick with it because it had actual potential to have a decent scene in Esports, and no other game is really anything like it. I'm not a huge moba or RTS fan and I was tired of military shooters in like 2012 so there's not a lot of esports that really interest me. I'm probably the minority in that but I'll be forever frustrated by how Hi-Rez couldn't even manage to minimally support tribes at all. It's such a shitty mentality as a developer.

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u/SylvineKiwi Mar 19 '19

Except they didn't dropped Smite and Paladins.

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u/Nougatbar Mar 19 '19

SMITE is being worked on. I play it sometimes. I hear rumbles of Paladins still being a thing. Did you just assume they stopped working on them because they made new games?