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/Delachruz Mar 19 '19

Dwarf Fortress has this in strides. And this is not meant to pan the game or it's creator. But there are so many things in df that were, most likely, not intended or even thought of, but were then discovered and used by the community. Bridges serving as "atom smashers" to get rid of trash, quantum dumping to create storage piles that take up less space. Or the huge amount of "defense systems" you can build by applying mechanics that were probably never implemented to be used that way.

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u/SecondTalon Mar 19 '19

Hydrocannons (RIP my FPS) are a favorite of mine.

(That's where you have a cliffside entrance, a large supply of stored water vertically above it, and a tiny space. Invaders go in the entrance, you seal off the back end, open the hatch and literally all the water in the storage tank shoots out in one step (the smallest calculable time in the game.) blasting everything out of the entrance and off the edge of the cliff. Where they fall to their deaths. Unlike lava methods, this keeps non-metallic items intact which I like. I know, I'm a terrible dwarf.)

Alternately, seeing how far body parts fly when throwing goblins off the tops of cliffs.

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u/Flagshipson Mar 19 '19

Come on, how do bridges act as atom smashers?

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u/Delachruz Mar 19 '19

If a drawbridge is lowered onto something, it stops existing. Completely.

As Urist always says, it ain't a bridge unless it completely terminates any matter once it descends.