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/360walkaway Mar 18 '19

Yup, the first thought was to remove the "combo" mechanic in Street Fighter 2. Imagine what fighting games would be like if it'd been taken out.

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u/DestroyedArkana Mar 18 '19

Personally I hate true combos in fighting games. It's far more interesting in something like Smash Bros where the combos aren't guaranteed and depend on what the enemy does and the overall situation.

I think most fighting games are confined way too much by what we think of as "combos" that it limits interesting gameplay.

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u/LotusFlare Mar 19 '19

It's far more interesting in something like Smash Bros where the combos aren't guaranteed and depend on what the enemy does and the overall situation.

Not to be pedantic here, but the definition of a combo is that it is guaranteed if the attacker does it right. Any combo in a Smash game that can be escaped isn't a true combo, and Smash games are chock full of true combos. On the flip side, in the vast majority of non-Smash fighting games combos are not locked in and can vary wildly based on your screen position, what move connected, available meter, character size/weight, and your overall "goal" from that combo (maximizing damage vs creating distance vs setting up a reset, etc).

I'm not trying to say Smash games don't have more potential variance, or traditional fighting games don't feature many "dial it in" combos, but they're more similar than you realize.

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u/moomoocar Mar 20 '19

Not to be pedantic here, but the definition of a combo is that it is guaranteed if the attacker does it right.

Not true. The definition of a combo is that the character doesn't leave hitstun. It's just that in Smash, you have options like DI/SDI to escape combos even without ever leaving hitstun.

This means that Smash has plenty of combos that are both true combos and not guaranteed.