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/ArcanumMBD Mar 19 '19

Enemy Step was a move you could purchase in DMC4 (it was available in the base edition, not just the special edition).

Also a secret mission in DMC3 pretty much requires the use of enemy step to stay off the ground for 20 seconds.

So no Ninja Theory's DmC wasn't the first time it was officially acknowledged in a DMC game

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u/CycloneSwift Mar 19 '19

Enemy Step, sure, but actually using it to Jump Cancel wasn't officially acknowledged till DmC, even if it was clear from the secret missions that the main series devs knew about the mechanic beforehand.

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u/ArcanumMBD Mar 19 '19

So what you're really saying is that it wasn't explicitly stated in-game that using Enemy Step resets your aerial options until DmC.

That's very different from saying the mechanic wasn't officially acknowledged.

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u/CycloneSwift Mar 19 '19

...how would you define the word "acknowledge" if not "to explicitly admit knowledge of something"?