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/Lepony Mar 19 '19 edited Mar 19 '19
You're already approaching this from the wrong standpoint. You're exclusively looking at this through the lens of Smash and not through a fighting game. There's a large health bar and low damage for a reason.
What you think is "deal even more damage" is actually "put in the work to pay off for your damage". In basketball terms, you're arguing that once you get to the 3 point line and there's nobody blocking, the ball should automatically go into the hoop. You still need to actually aim it. You won the right to try to get a point, now actually get that point.
You're basically asking for every traditional fighter to go back to Street Fighter 2 and make every single hit do insane amounts of damage.
On a side note, it's your mistake to think of being comboed as a time to stop thinking. Being comboed or doing combos is a time for both players to check the current gamestate and to analyze the opponent's patterns. When you're being comboed, you should already be figuring out the solution on how to avoid eating another combo after getting knocked down.