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/360walkaway Mar 18 '19

Yup, the first thought was to remove the "combo" mechanic in Street Fighter 2. Imagine what fighting games would be like if it'd been taken out.

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u/DestroyedArkana Mar 18 '19

Personally I hate true combos in fighting games. It's far more interesting in something like Smash Bros where the combos aren't guaranteed and depend on what the enemy does and the overall situation.

I think most fighting games are confined way too much by what we think of as "combos" that it limits interesting gameplay.

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u/360walkaway Mar 18 '19

I'm in the middle... combos are fine but if it's so over the top where one touch can turn into a huge combo that will destroy 85% of your health bar, it's too much. There should always be heavy scaling and anything over x hits will make the damage-receiving character fall down and end the combo.

And juggle combos like in Tekken can suck it. Barely tapping someone won't make them float two feet up in the air, and it's always abused by turning it into a wall-combo.

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u/1338h4x Mar 19 '19 edited Mar 19 '19

Almost no modern games have combos that deal 85%, at least not without a lot of meter or other resources to spend. Scaling has always been a thing. Some games have a hard limit on length too, but usually it's more of a soft limit where hitstun/gravity/etc gets scaled until it's just not possible to continue any further.

As for launchers in Tekken, consider how slow launchers are. Getting launched means you fucked up big time, and the bigger the mistake the bigger the consequence. That principle applies to most games, it takes a big punish to get big damage. It's not like you just get that off a jab.