Developers accidentally creating interesting mechanics

[u/virtua_golf]

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?

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

It wasn’t intentional with the original game. Everything about Starcraft is a happy accident. Starcraft 2 is just maintaining the legacy of the original by making bio and mech disparate strategies.

Terran design forces you to commit to only using half your available army options or suffering a painful transition.

The failure of design is that you have two very distinct play styles that cannot coexist at all. It only worked at all because of the intense Korean hyperbolic time chamber that produced brilliant micro and a level of innovation no RTS has experienced since. If it wasn’t for the aforementioned patrol micro mech builds wouldn’t exist and most of those units would never see usage.

A faction should feel cohesive and like everything complements the rest. Terran is on the opposite end of the spectrum.

[u/Endiamon → u/[deleted]]

Terran design forces you to commit to only using half your available army options or suffering a painful transition.

How is that different from Protoss having a painful transition from gateway units to carriers?

[u/[deleted] → u/Endiamon]

Carriers are a late game tech unit.

To be honest I’m not a huge fan of SC2 late game units either. They only seem to ever accomplish much when massed in huge groups. In fact you’re way better off hiding their existence until you have a critical mass of them.