Exploits you discovered on your own that completely trivialized a game

[Deleted member 20297]

Dark Souls 3:
I found a good XP farming spot that made the game a lot easier for me.
I found out you could kill bosses from outside the fog. That solved the Dancer problem for me.

 

[KeRaSh]

In Super Soccer on the SNES I found a strategy to get the ball from the enemy team and run in a specific line and shoot from a specific spot to score a goal 100% of the time.

 

[Iztok]

Fifa '96 on SNES, you could bicycle kick the opponent goalie's throw-in every time for a free goal.


edit: nice, two SNES footie references in a row.

 

[GymWolf86]

Stamina potion on zelda completely trivialize climbing and level design related to climbing.
Kinda the same with defense and strengh food for combat.

And it's not even a secret exploit, it's basically an ingame mechanic.

It's easy to fix for the sequel, just don't allow drinking and eating from a menu or just reduce the resoruces in the world by 50+ %.

 

[Trisc]

Yoshi's Island, world 4-1, there's a Shy Guy pipe with a small divet to the left. If you take a koopa shell, stand on the edge of the divet, and spit it, it'll bounce off the pipe and onto Yoshi's feet. Instead of damaging Yoshi, since you're technically above the shell by standing on the edge, it simply bounces back to the pipe. Any Shy Guys that hop out while you're doing this get shelled instantly, and after the 7th, you get a 1-up. Each one that's hit after this grants another 1-up, meaning you can effectively have infinite lives.

I don't know how I figured this out when I was 6-7, but I did. It helped me a lot through world 5 having over 500 lives, given I was terrible at platforming on ice, and those levels felt punishingly difficult.

Stamina potion on zelda completely trivialize climbing and level design related to climbing.
Kinda the same with defense and strengh food for combat.

And it's not even a secret exploit, it's basically an ingame mechanic.

It's easy to fix for the sequel, just don't allow drinking and eating from a menu or just reduce the resoruces in the world by 50+ %.

Click to shrink...

Why fix it? It lent itself so well to the open-ended nature of the game. You explored enough to find resources to make stamina-boosting items, and so you should be rewarded in the same way one might secure a bunch of stamina upgrades or find the climber's outfit. That freedom to experiment is part of why BotW is so great in my eyes.

 

[Karlinel]

I found a weird item combination in Symphony of the night (shield rod?) that simply made you indestructible. Item said nothing about that iirc, so it was surprising.
In dark souls 2 sotfs, the red twinblade made you a spinning machine of death that trivialized the game so much I platinumed it taking about 5h for the 2nd AND 3rd playthroughs, combined.

 

[SMD]

.

 

[Kain]

In one of the PS3 FIFAs you could score every single fucking time with shoot+R2 (which is controlled shot or some nonsense) if you did it in a specific position outside the area. It worked perfectly every time, specially with Ronaldo or Messi. That button was always messy but in that specific edition it was just too much and online was a nightmare.

Also in the first PES on PSX you could very easily destroy the master league mode by just buying Babangida. He was the cheapest fastest player available at the beginning of the game, when you're broke and starting, and he was so fast compared to everybody else that he carried you through basically everything until the endgame.

 

[Hamlet Machine]

In Final Fantasy Tactics... TGcid.

 

[Dust]

In Sekiro the blocking/parry animation is so fast that you can cancel one block into another, which actually means fast piano spamming block button to parry works most of the time when you cannot parry precisely.

 

[KillstealWolf]

About half the new features in a pokemon game since X and Y.

Wanna do Amie? Whoops, pokemon overlevel and now dodge attacks they shouldn't with ease. They even shrug off status.
O-Powers? Turns out boosted EXP does break the level curve.
Mega Evolutions? Well now you have something that hits harder than a Base Mewtwo does, and have a Lucario to go with it.
Z-Moves? Guess I just one-shotted those Totem Bosses
Dynamax? I Use this turn one then snowball the gym.
Wild Area Raids? Here's an absurdly overleveled pokemon for this point of the game, oh and here's a late game move for them to use as well.
Exp Share always on? Guess my whole team now outlevels the gym-leader.

Honestly the harder part of pokemon is finding ways to give the AI a chance to even beat you.

 

[Rotobit]

one of the Lucky Hit boards in Shenmue 2 near the first hotel is pretty easy to game once you figure out the ideal place to drop the ball. Shenmue 3 is trivialized even more by giving you the ability to right save before you gamble.

 

[Plinkerton]

I have a pretty good one that I've never really seen discussed since. My memory on it is a little hazy but still...

In the original SOCOM for PS2 there was a map that was set in a town, I think it was supposed to be like a favela or something and the mission was to either protect the hostages or extract them, depending on which team your on (bad guys or good guys).

Anyway if you were the bad guys, there was one spot where you could lead the hostages onto a roof of a small house using a wooden bridge/plank then shoot the plank down so that no one else could get onto the roof. This meant the hostages were essentially stuck in an inaccessible area and so couldn't be extracted and you couldn't lose if you were the bad guys. I did this all the time and won loads of games by this method.

Looking back now it was a pretty shitty thing to do because it basically ruined the game for everyone else and these days it would definitely have been patched. But I was like 12 at the time and thought it was hilarious.

 

[GymWolf86]

Yoshi's Island, world 4-1, there's a Shy Guy pipe with a small divet to the left. If you take a koopa shell, stand on the edge of the divet, and spit it, it'll bounce off the pipe and onto Yoshi's feet. Instead of damaging Yoshi, since you're technically above the shell by standing on the edge, it simply bounces back to the pipe. Any Shy Guys that hop out while you're doing this get shelled instantly, and after the 7th, you get a 1-up. Each one that's hit after this grants another 1-up, meaning you can effectively have infinite lives.

I don't know how I figured this out when I was 6-7, but I did. It helped me a lot through world 5 having over 500 lives, given I was terrible at platforming on ice, and those levels felt punishingly difficult.

Why fix it? It lent itself so well to the open-ended nature of the game. You explored enough to find resources to make stamina-boosting items, and so you should be rewarded in the same way one might secure a bunch of stamina upgrades or find the climber's outfit. That freedom to experiment is part of why BotW is so great in my eyes.

Click to shrink...

Yeah you are right (i don't like it personally), but it still remain a thing that completely trivialize climbing, the topic is all about these things isn't?
Personally, i think that Eating and drinking from a menu without any malus is a little bit too forgiving as a mechanic.

 

[xendless]

I dunno about trivialising the whole game but there's this bowling game in breath of the wild that got you all the money you ever wanted once you figure out the right angle.
So buying all of the armour with it suddenly makes environmental hazards not an issue

 

[TheEchosOfTheCyborg]

No the full game but I found just changing the clock on the PS4 allowed me to skip the needless and pointlessly long wait times for the War Table missions in Dragon Age Inquisition and thank Lilith for that, I hate stuff like that in games, it's not fun and feels needlessly pointless for what, a staff that I can make a better version in like a minute?!

Which of course which is why they "fixed" it so that exploit didn't work in Mass Effect Andromeda because "fun"... Why do devs do this?

 

[OrangeNova]

NHL 94 on the PS1

If you hold Circle to flip the puck as long as you can and go behind your own goal, letting go of Circle while facing the opponents net to launch the puck will 100% land in their net. every time.

 

[OrangeNova]

In Final Fantasy Tactics... TGcid.

Click to shrink...

FFT! The Square + R1 glitch on any Job ability screen with more than 1 page!

I found that by accident and trivialized that run of the game.

 

[IDreamOfHime]

ISS64/98/2000 on the N64.

Run directly at the goalkeeper and then when you're close to him sprint in any diagonal direction and press shoot.

Games would be like 33-0 at half time.

 

[dskzero]

I vaguely remember lots of these, but three come to mind:

FIFA 98, but I think it worked up to 2010 or something: Run with fast player in a slight diagonal line to the keeper and shoot when close. The AI pretty much never stops those. I remember scoring 20 or so goals per game in 98, didn't try to go that high on the later games.

Hat Trick Hero (Arcade) Run forward from the middle of the pitch, 3/4 of the way move slightly up, and then shoot when you reach the area. Always scored.

Seiken Densetsu 3: You could bypass the casting time by callling the menu in the middle of casting. This made a lot of fights much more manageable.

 

[IDreamOfHime]

lmao at all the football exploits, must be a nightmare being a footie dev.

 

[horsebite]

In NHL Stanley Cup for SNES, if you skated with the puck down the middle of the ice and pressed Y (dump puck button) right when you hit the red line, the puck would fly up in the air toward the goal, the goalie would skate out, and the puck would land behind the goalie and slide right into the net, every single time.

Had a lot of 99-0 games. My bro and I had to make a pact to not use this when playing each other.

 

[dskzero]

In Kirby's Adventure, you can get the Mike powerup, which destroys all enemies on the screen. It's very powerful, but you can only use it 3 times before it disappears forever.

Unless... If you use the very last Mike power at the same time you hit a switch (to reveal secrets) or get a piece of the Star Rod, then you can use Mike 256 more times. It's great for beating bosses, too.

Click to shrink...

In the early days of pokemon gen 1, nobody knew about effort values. But my friends and I figured out they existed. We didn't know how they worked exactly, but we knew that fighting more battles lead to stronger pokemon.

Everyone already knew about the Missingo trick, so all the teams you saw back then were leveled to 100 with rare candies, but had no EV growth. So our teams, which were hand raised, ended up with significant stat advantages. It backfired a bit later because I belived that rare candy prevented pokemon from gaining those stats and dindn't leanr how EVs really worked until gen 6. But in gen 1 my charizard was god.

Also i figured out early on that moves with increased crit ratios always hit critically if you were fast enough. So many people wasted time with solar beam and hyper beam while I just razor leaf and slashed my way through.

Click to shrink...

Lol I remember when this hit the Internet. The legendary 323 speed Starmie.

 

[badnewsbeers]

NHL 2005, found if you carry the puck up the right side with a right hand shot and press B for a clapper right inside the opposing blue line, you'll score every single time. I think I won the Stanley cup that year 63-2.

 

[badnewsbeers]

In Sekiro the blocking/parry animation is so fast that you can cancel one block into another, which actually means fast piano spamming block button to parry works most of the time when you cannot parry precisely.

Click to shrink...

And thank god for that indeed, my 33 year old brain struggled to block otherwise.

 

[Nightside]

I'm FM2012 you could easily convince another team to sell you a player by offering a small fixed fee and an outrageous bonus for an impossible to fulfill bonus condition (like 8 millions fixed part and 100 millions if the player scores 100 goals)
Fifa99: run into the box from the right side, pass to the center. A midfielder will score 99% of the time
One of the first PES on ps2 choose Valencia use John Carew (or whatever his fake name was), shoot a corner on the nearest post. Goal 99% of the time, impossibile to defend

 

[Shadow]

About half the new features in a pokemon game since X and Y.

Wanna do Amie? Whoops, pokemon overlevel and now dodge attacks they shouldn't with ease. They even shrug off status.
O-Powers? Turns out boosted EXP does break the level curve.
Mega Evolutions? Well now you have something that hits harder than a Base Mewtwo does, and have a Lucario to go with it.
Z-Moves? Guess I just one-shotted those Totem Bosses
Dynamax? I Use this turn one then snowball the gym.
Wild Area Raids? Here's an absurdly overleveled pokemon for this point of the game, oh and here's a late game move for them to use as well.
Exp Share always on? Guess my whole team now outlevels the gym-leader.

Honestly the harder part of pokemon is finding ways to give the AI a chance to even beat you.

Click to shrink...

I'm always switching out my pokémon in my box for low leveled ones to evolve them (once evolved at lvl 35... back to lvl 7). Or if they get above 5 levels or so of wild pokémon I switch them out. Usually under leveled and barely beat the gym leaders. Have to use potions/revives etc. I find it most fun that way.

Street Fighter 2 Turbo SNES. Spam Honda's Hundred Hand Slap. Got through the game literally only using that move.

 

[SirMossyBloke]

Not really an exploit, but once you got the silenced pistol in the first Killzone everyone died in one hit from a headshot. Needless to say I didn't play it much afterwards.

 

[Deleted member 21411]

Persona 5 let you flu season the grim reaper for insane xp. I think i broke the game doing that

 

[Deleted member 31873]

I played a VR Breakout clone where the ball always spawns directly in front of the player when starting the level. So I'd just walk right up to the bricks as each level begins, causing the ball to spawn behind the bricks, so it would usually knock out a whole bunch of the level and give me a ton of power-ups before I even had to do anything.

The game is part of a VR vision therapy system, so I doubt (m)any people here have played it.

 

[sibarraz]

In this game if you quit to the main menu, and then return to the game, you can keep the score while reseting the snake form.

Even when I already was the top scorer in this game on my class, I once did this exploit, and a classmate tried to surpass me an entire weekend. He didn't and I told him the secret.

Good times

 

[Deleted member 17402]

Scoring in Blitzball and being up at least 1-0 meant you could just hug your side of the field and constantly pass to other players in order to run the time out.

 

[Daggoth]

Obliterator (PC, 1989): there were four guns, ranging from peashooter to powerful bazooka, with corresponding ammo scarcity.

Firing a gun, and then switching the gun while the projectile was in flight, would also switch the projectile to the newer gun.

 

[Brood]

In racing games your car doesn't move. The car itself is fixed while the world scrolls beside you. Once I realized that it ruined racing games for me

 

[Deleted member 10726]

Lynels in Breath of the Wild have an incredibly exploitable AI, given that at close range they love opting for a three hit combo you can easily dodge with backflips and punish with flurry rushes.

Figured this out on my first encounter during the Zora questline and never had any issues fighting them for the rest of the game.

 

[Alo81]

Not a forced exploit, but likely repeatable. in Banjo Kazooie nuts and bolts hub world, one of the last areas is inaccessible due to a bridge being up.

But, its a physics bridge. While driving past, i watched the bridge sort of jitter, then slowly shift forward past the point of no return, then fall flat.
I drove over, grabbed all the parts, which meant early game having access to fully stocked jet engines.

Trivialized much of it, but also opened a tonnnn of creative potential.

 

[Shining Star]

I found a combination of moves in The Caligula Effect that could win every fight in a single turn, except for one phase of the final boss that took two turns. I ran past every enemy in the game and just beat the bosses.

 

[OrangeNova]

In NHL Stanley Cup for SNES, if you skated with the puck down the middle of the ice and pressed Y (dump puck button) right when you hit the red line, the puck would fly up in the air toward the goal, the goalie would skate out, and the puck would land behind the goalie and slide right into the net, every single time.

Had a lot of 99-0 games. My bro and I had to make a pact to not use this when playing each other.

Click to shrink...

I love how it seems this bug just exists in hockey games prior to NHL 99

 

[LSauchelli]

I remember International Super Star Soccer, how if just after you entered the penalty area turned right, and then forward you'd never miss a goal.

This meant that once everyone figured that out our games all had a ridiculous amount of goals, 95% were all the exact same goal.

 

[Chrno]

NFL Blitz for the N64 - if you just turbo ran and hugged the sidelines you could pretty much always catch the ball.

 

[Lobster Roll]

The Suikoden 1 Marco money trick.

Played the game on my Vita, camping in Australia, without any Internet whatsoever, and discovered this trick.

I finished Suikoden 1 rich as fuck.

Click to shrink...

My memory is hazy on S1, but I thought it was an intentional game design in S2 to have the values of items be worth more / less depending on the town. That way, if you get out there and leg supplies around the world, you make money by being a traveling merchant.

 

[jukeboxhero2396]

GTA5 stock market exploit.

When the PS4 version first came out I found this weird glitch with the stock market that would allow you to have infinite money basically.

 

[Lobster Roll]

I remember International Super Star Soccer, how if just after you entered the penalty area turned right, and then forward you'd never miss a goal.

This meant that once everyone figured that out our games all had a ridiculous amount of goals, 95% were all the exact same goal.

Click to shrink...

Are you talking about 64 or 2000? I recall in 64 there being like a dozen exploit goals. My favorite was drawing the keeper out of the goal box, taking a touch back to the penalty box, and then chipping him. The announcer yelling "HE GOES FOR THE LOOP!" never got old for me as a kid.

 

[Jessie]

Spyro 2: Ripto's Rage. Oooooh boy did I destroy that game with exploits.

You can jump out of bounds pretty easily, which opens up a lot of fun possibilities. You can skip levels, get the 100% completion power up early, etc.

 

[Chrno]

on the PS1, if your disc was scratched and paused during cutscenes you could open the the overhead disc cover, slightly move the disk in a clockwise manner, and close the cover to skip the cutscene so you could continue with the game.

 

[DealWithIt]

I rented centurion: defender of Rome for Genesis, as a kid. Game was pretty hard, but I discovered you could win 99% of battles by using the formation "scipio's defense." Which seems to give your units an unreasonably high defense stat. Armies just marched into you and lost in situations where it would be otherwise unwinnable. I beat the game in a weekend.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centurion:_Defender_of_Rome

 

[Auron.90]

Infinite souls in Demon's Souls and pokèmon cloning are the first two that come to mind.

 

[Chrno]

i honestly don't even know how/where I heard of the missingno glitch before the internet.

 

[Jessie]

In Neopets I discovered an exploit to get unlimited neopoints using the plushie repair guy, and I never got frozen for it lmao.

This was like 15 years ago so hopefully the statute of limitations have passed by now.

 

[Deleted member 46948]

Discovered the exploit to max level lockpicking on the tutorial chest in Kingdom Come Deliverance. It was patched a week after release, but I was already an unstoppable thief. And then a bunch of money exploits that completely trivialized the game on account of having the best gear and tens of thousands of groschen.

Also, the replicator exploit in Prey (Arkane). That has also been patched pretty quickly.