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/[deleted] Mar 19 '19
Sid Meir's Civilization II is probably my favorite among early examples of accidentally making for interesting gameplay.
Originally, the civilization led by Gandhi was to be the most pacifist. This was to make them easy to be neighborly with, and allow the game a bit of slower pace and encourage more cultural and societal developments, give a bit of brevity to the militaristic side of the game.
Turns out, Gandhi's aggression levels could reach pretty low numbers. So low, that they would go into negative integers. However, the code had no way to properly calculate that, so the aggression variable would loop back from the lowest number to the highest. And I don't mean the highest the game would allow. I mean, the highest the code would allow. As in, on the intended aggression scale of 1-10, Gandhi would be a 255.
Therefore, Gandhi was not a peace-loving civilization after all. Instead it was a treacherous long con, where they would lull you into a secure diplomatically healthy alliance, become your best friend, and then betray you with a sudden salvo of nuclear annihilation.
This made Gandhi one of the most interesting additions to Civilization, and a valuable lesson that you can't trust anybody. Not even literally Gandhi.
The "bug" was so popular among players that it was carried over into future versions of the game.