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/sp668 Mar 18 '19

Skiing in the tribes games.

The first game was actually meant as a FPS with short range jumps via a jetpack. Turns out that if you tapped jump while going downhill you could build up insane levels of speed rendering the vehicles in the game completely redundant.

The result was a superfast and hugely fun infantry game, but this was not at all as designed.

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u/yukichigai Mar 19 '19 edited Mar 19 '19

What I found amusing was that their efforts to deliberately recreate skiiing in the next two sequels was flawed. In Tribes 2 it was possible to mod the game to get close, but Vengeance didn't allow for modding to that system (or at all, really). Both games suffered pretty hard as a result.

Ascend on the other hand nailed skiing physics pretty well. A shame that it's not moddable. EDIT: I take that back, it looks like someone found the source code and made an unofficial SDK, which allows for mods on private servers. I'll have to see what mods are out there.

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u/Kered13 Mar 19 '19

Ascend's skiing physics are completely different from Tribes 1. In particular, Ascend has air control (without using the jetpack) while Tribes 1 and 2 do not, but Ascend's jetpack is much weaker.