Mechanics in games that had the exact opposite results of their intended design

[Deleted member 33533]

I don't understand the BOTW issue.

It was intended that weapons break easily. The mechanics of it do not create an unintended consequence, when people refuse to interact with the system that is a user choice, not a problem with mechanics.

The OPs example was a simple block button had an unintended consequence of adding too much complexity and having application in offense.
The BOTW example is weapon degradation working as intended but users not liking it.

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Yeah, this is true. What you're going to get from replies though are peoples' personal feelings on it. "It's supposed to do this but I didn't like it so I didn't do that" therefore it has the opposite result of what was intended.

I do agree that most people who bounce off of BotW's weapon degradation are working against the intended system, instead working off expectations and rules set by other games they've played. We've been programmed to hoard in video games but BotW actively tells you not to do that.

 

[Chopchop]

Zell's Duel limit break in FF8.

Intent: the player can enter fighting game inputs within a set time to do cool combos.

What actually happened: you can alternate between the two absolute simplest inputs over and over to spend the least amount of time inputting stuff, which results in you doing way more damage than you're supposed to.

 

[Crispy]

It was also detrimental to the game on a narrative level.

The game keeps shouting about how the relationship between driver and blade is precious and beutiful, with multiple characters falling in love with their blades/drivers, giving their lives for their blades/drivers, and blades lamenting that they'll forget about their drivers when they move on.

And then the game throws hundreds of garbage blades at the player, who'll inevitably either not give a single shit about any of them or they'll find them actively annoying. The mechanic is completely at odds with the message that the game tries to tell.

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Great observation and I couldn't agree more.

 

[Mechaplum]

It was also detrimental to the game on a narrative level.

The game keeps shouting about how the relationship between driver and blade is precious and beutiful, with multiple characters falling in love with their blades/drivers, giving their lives for their blades/drivers, and blades lamenting that they'll forget about their drivers when they move on.

And then the game throws hundreds of garbage blades at the player, who'll inevitably either not give a single shit about any of them or they'll find them actively annoying. The mechanic is completely at odds with the message that the game tries to tell.

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Right on the money.

 

[Riskbreaker]

I can't say for sure this was unintended, but I highly doubt when they made the Ninja class in FFXI, they intended it to be a tank.

It seems like the class was intended to be a scout/DPS/solo type class (with its many utility ninja spells, ability to self-destruct without losing exp, built in silence effect, etc), but two ninja spells it has (Utsusemi: Ichi and Utsusemi: Ni) allow the class to completely avoid damage.

Coupling this with high emnity gear and Warrior subclass allowed Ninja to effectively tank monsters and rarely, if ever, take damage. This meant your party could effectively kill things faster by having your healer DPS more, or in some cases, barely have a healer.

They eventually seemed to fully embrace the class as a tank, adding armor for the class that built in emnity and dodge and parry stats, necessary for tanking, but it's hard to think that was the plan when they first added the class.

Granted, this is all as of 2003-2005ish... I stopped playing the game after that so I can't say what other potential unintended classes or mechanics were used in that game.

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Still the best tank I have ever played until SE kept kneecapping them for PLD.

Have not gotten the same feeling from a Tank class in an MMO ever again.

 

[alpha]

"It wasn't for reasons you guys have said like hoarding" - immediately goes into literally describing compulsive hoarding complete with "but I like the way they look!"

I'm sure the lady in the trailer with garbage bursting out her windows really likes the aesthetics of the magazines and newspapers that fill every inch of her living space.

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Except I actually would use the weapons, watch them break, get the lame looking weapons, then go "man these look dumb", and walk around still having a bunch of weapons (because as people said they fall from the sky), just "hoarding" ugly ones because that's what you happened to be fighting. It's nearly impossible to not hoard weapons in BOTW because you get them so often.

I played the game as it was intended and used the weapons but I absolutely don't like when they break and you end up with a crappier looking pile of the same thing. It's the one flaw of the game to me and later on in the nearly 200 hours I put into that game led me to just not fight random mobs on the field as often because there wasn't a point. But I'm glad you liked the way it worked, apparently so since you took the time to attack me about it.

 

[Haze]

Gears of War cover system. No one uses it in MP the way it was designed to be.

WALLBOUNCE

 

[Kyuuji]

Things that have never been used:

Divine Blessings

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Replaying Dark Souls 3 atm and I feel attacked.

 

[VaporSnake]

Except I actually would use the weapons, watch them break, get the lame looking weapons, then go "man these look dumb", and walk around still having a bunch of weapons (because as people said they fall from the sky), just "hoarding" ugly ones because that's what you happened to be fighting. It's nearly impossible to not hoard weapons in BOTW because you get them so often.

I played the game as it was intended and used the weapons but I absolutely don't like when they break and you end up with a crappier looking pile of the same thing. It's the one flaw of the game to me and later on in the nearly 200 hours I put into that game led me to just not fight random mobs on the field as often because there wasn't a point. But I'm glad you liked the way it worked, apparently so since you took the time to attack me about it.

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It wasn't an attack, just pointing out that you undermined yourself completely by describing common hoarder behavior and excuse rhetoric right after claiming you didn't hoard.

It's okay though, you're not a hoarder, you just like to meticulously collect things that please you aesthetically that you store away for future use that never comes....Deeefinitely not hoarder behavior.

 

[NightShift]

I felt like BotW's weapon degradation system worked as intended. A lot of people say it made them hoard weapons for boss fights and avoid unnecessary combat and I feel like that was totally by design. It is a pseudo survival game after all.

I think Vanquish and its cover system had a similar issue where the mechanic worked as intended but was often interpreted as a bad thing.

 

[Baron Von Beans]

I remember the flamethrower in Turok 2 OWNED like everything you covered in that firey gel. Hyde had a badass flamethrower in Evolve, too, that shit was very powerful. Otherwise flamethrowers never really seemed worth their time. Especially zombie games! They keep coming at you, but now they are on fire and can catch you on fire too!

 

[LegendofLex]

Then you have to fight an horde of white bokoblins with a branch.

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Exactly? The point was that you wouldn't just pick up a strong weapon and automatically be prepared for encounters of that tier for the rest of the game. You'd have to decide whether and how to even try to engage an enemy based on the gear you had at the moment

 

[Deleted member 31817]

I don't think this is true for most people but for me the constant objective arrows that told you where to go just made sure I would always go that route last and explore everywhere else first.

 

[Jonathan Lanza]

I felt like BotW's weapon degradation system worked as intended. A lot of people say it made them hoard weapons for boss fights and avoid unnecessary combat and I feel like that was totally by design. It is a pseudo survival game after all.

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I'm with you on this one. It seems like it's supposed to be a decision making process of take of preserve everything and avoid combat or be willing to waste something and make fighting easier.

I think the reason people end up feeling burned by it is just that it's a video game and no matter how good a game is you can never tell until it's too late if it's gonna pull a fast one on you and suddenly have some unbeatable boss fight that requires X sword or some secret unlockable dungeon that needs Y amount of Korok Leaves to unlock. By the end of BOTW I can say you don't need most any specific weapon to do anything but the game like most other games isn't exactly upfront about that so it makes sense that people prepare for the worst.

 

[alpha]

It wasn't an attack, just pointing out that you undermined yourself completely by describing common hoarder behavior and excuse rhetoric right after claiming you didn't hoard.

It's okay though, you're not a hoarder, you just like to meticulously collect things that please you aesthetically that you store away for future use that never comes....Deeefinitely not hoarder behavior.

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Yeah it would be if I actually stored the weapons. But I didn't. I used them, watched them break and then got sad when they got replaced with a dumb club or whatever the guy had on him.

It did make me not enjoy fighting though and avoid it later on as I was finding my last shrines and such, as it wasn't fun to watch weapons break only to be immediately replaced, just with something uglier than what you had before.

I played the game as it intended me to for nearly 200 hours. But it did have the unintended consequence of making me dislike combat.

 

[Garrod Ran]

I don't think this is true for most people but for me the constant objective arrows that told you where to go just made sure I would always go that route last and explore everywhere else first.

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it's both, imo. People who are interested in story progression know where to go immediately and people who are interested in exploration know where to go last

 

[Deleted member 31817]

it's both, imo. People who are interested in story progression know where to go immediately and people who are interested in exploration know where to go last

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If that was the intention then it's pretty great.

 

[Dahbomb]

Most of those block mechanics in GBVS are about to get fixed as stated by ASW. So it's just a temporary thing.

Sparking in DBFZ was introduced to shorten game length and to make it easier to make comebacks. However, because of the blue HP regen you get from it, it actually made matches longer and people rather used it to save their point character over saving for a comeback. They have had to change sperking and blue HP multiple times and it's still not where they want to be so now they are adding a new mechanic on top for easier comebacks.

Pandora mode in SFxT that was intended as a comeback/last ditch effort when in most cases if you used it your chances of losing the match were higher than if you never used it at all!

 

[Valkerion]

I can't say for sure this was unintended, but I highly doubt when they made the Ninja class in FFXI, they intended it to be a tank.

It seems like the class was intended to be a scout/DPS/solo type class (with its many utility ninja spells, ability to self-destruct without losing exp, built in silence effect, etc), but two ninja spells it has (Utsusemi: Ichi and Utsusemi: Ni) allow the class to completely avoid damage.

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This is a good one.

The player base completely 180'd the job class against the clear intent. It was fun seeing SE go from ignoring it saying thats not what its for, buffing more DPS aspects of it to encourage that only to result in people favoring it EVEN MORE since now they were dishing out damage and tanking, to finally just giving up and giving them tank gear haha.

 

[jem]

Sprint in Halo slows down the pace of matches by encouraging chasing and limiting offensive options. Depending on the game the severity of this varies, but it's true for all of them.

Maybe it was the intention, but it seems counterintuitive

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The intention of sprint is to make the game feel faster. To that end it largely succeeds.

 

[Encephalon]

Weapon degradation in Breath of the Wild. Encourage me to use more weapons? Nope! I've got an inventory full of good stuff and will run from every mob until I encounter something "worthy" of using these great weapons on.

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It's compounded by the fact that you can't upgrade weapon slots anywhere. I ended up spending a few hours going through half of the map to find the Korok forest so I wouldn't have to throw up some of the seemingly unique ones I had acquired ...

It really disincentivized me from attempting to take my time and enjoy exploring. Instead, now I know what's there and just have to fill in the blanks.

 

[DrArchon]

Pandora mode in SFxT that was intended as a comeback/last ditch effort when in most cases if you used it your chances of losing the match were higher than if you never used it at all!

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I feel like this whole thread could be SFxT mechanics.

Remember 30-60-90? Almost every character in the game had homogenized damage for normal moves. I guess it was to try and balance the game, but all that ended up happening was the characters with good normals completely trounced everyone else.

 

[night814]

For more abstract mechanics, voice chat usually does a great job getting me to not interact with anyone else in the game, and microtransactions usually do a great job at getting me to spend less money.

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I absolutely agree

 

[night814]

Then you have to fight an horde of white bokoblins with a branch.

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Or your bombs, or cryonosis, or arrows.

Or fire in the area, crates, boxs, boulders.

The trick is to get them to drop their weapon, and then use it against them. There's only a few enemies where this can't be done.

 

[Tokyo_Funk]

Tribes 1 players: "Jetpacks and jumping? Who the fuck needs that when we got strange friction? Let's skii and boost around like crazy people."

Tribes 2 Devs "Yeah, fuck it we made it a feature, ski all you want"

 

[Calvinien]

The ammo drop system in Last of Us.

It's a survival game that tries to make you feel like every item is precious....and ammo spawns based on what weapon you are using. As a result I barely used the more interesting weapons because i never had much ammo, but was swimming in ammo for the basic gun.

Dead space did something similar. The fewer guns you had, the easier the game was. If all you have is the plasma cutter, you will never run out of ammo, be able to max out the cutter's upgrades in like 2 levels because the only thing enemies will drop is plasma cutter ammo. It also removes the one major weakness of the cutter since you can spam it with absolute impunity.

 

[FF Seraphim]

Things that have never been used:

Divine Blessings

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I never used them. Always hoarded them for boss fights then still didn't use them since I didn't want to waste them on a boss I might die to... It was a bad mental loop.

 

[headspawn]

Crouching in Halo.

Is there ever a good reason to duck? Anything worth fixing behind which outweighs the slowness of doing it? Thus far over only seen it used to help with glitches and glorious teabagging.

 

[Gundam]

The intention of sprint is to make the game feel faster. To that end it largely succeeds.

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I'm not really gonna argue about Sprint with you but it's a failure that causes a myriad of issues that were previously non-existent and a detriment to Halo.

 

[jem]

Crouching in Halo.

Is there ever a good reason to duck? Anything worth fixing behind which outweighs the slowness of doing it? Thus far over only seen it used to help with glitches and glorious teabagging.

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Crouching allows you to move without being detected on radar. That is the main intention behind it.

I'm not really gonna argue about Sprint with you but it's a failure that causes a myriad of issues that were previously non-existent and a detriment to Halo.

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You can think that if you want, doesn't mean the mechanic has failed at to achieve the developers intention.

 

[Gundam]

Crouching allows you to move without being detected on radar. That is the main intention behind it.


You can think that if you want, doesn't mean the mechanic has failed at to achieve the developers intention.

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I await the day anyone that worked at 343 ever says "Sprint wasn't supposed to make the game faster, just trick you into thinking it was"

Unless that's already happened and I've missed it.

 

[mutantmagnet]

I think I've blocked it out because of how pissed I was but I'm pretty sure ReCore's fast travel system actually made everything slower.

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I clicked into this thread thinking I didn't know of such mechanics but you reminded me that this is exactly the problem a Walking Dead game had. What a joke.

 

[zMiiChy-]

I felt like BotW's weapon degradation system worked as intended. A lot of people say it made them hoard weapons for boss fights and avoid unnecessary combat and I feel like that was totally by design. It is a pseudo survival game after all.

I think Vanquish and its cover system had a similar issue where the mechanic worked as intended but was often interpreted as a bad thing.

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Intentional or not, it's still a shitty system.
It's not fun. It's not difficult.
It's tedious and annoying.

The mechanic will likely vanish in the sequel, and for good reason.

 

[psilocybe]

This might be a stretch but the cover system in Gears of War was designed to slam you into cover from which you would shoot but players use it to move around the map rapidly and dodge shotgun blasts.

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Going in this direction, the slides in Black Ops 3 and Titanfall 2 could generate crazy amounts of momentum if you did the slide at the correct frame. You could run the entire maps in a few seconds.

The g-slide was eventually fixed in Black Ops 3.
But the wall bouncing from Gears and slide from Titanfall were never changed.

Titanfall devs even said they liked how players found unwanted things and decided to keep it. These mechanics put me off from both games.

 

[LakeEarth]

I feel like this whole thread could be SFxT mechanics.

Remember 30-60-90? Almost every character in the game had homogenized damage for normal moves. I guess it was to try and balance the game, but all that ended up happening was the characters with good normals completely trounced everyone else.

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Yup. Another one was the autoblock gems. Intention was to help new players figure shit out, but they did nothing to prevent good players from using them too. Pretty easy to tech throws when you no longer have to sorry about the high low mix-ups.

It also lead to some completely bullshit strategies. Imaging playing a Zangief that has no fear walking forward. Or finally getting in on a Dhalsim, just for them to spam teleport. Sure they'd get "hit" a bunch of times, but eventually they'd get out losing only meter.

I never understood how they didn't see this coming.

 

[new londo ruins]

Throughout Metal Gear Solid 5, you extract enemies to have them come and work on your base, developing weapons and fighting for you and such. Developing the highest level items naturally requires you to have staff of the highest possible rank. But those staff don't spawn in the normal offline game world at all, so your only options are to steal them from other players online, which is inconsistent and sometimes not possible, or buy them with points from completing (again, online) events. It becomes basically pointless to extract enemies from the overworld or play non-lethally, even though the game's story heavily encourages non-lethal play (kill too many enemies and your PC becomes permanently covered in blood), and nearly defeats the point of playing the offline portion of the game at all.

 

[Nooblet]

Cover in Gears of War...atleast originally in Gears 1.
In gears 1 the game was designed to be slow paced, tactical cover shooter...then in MP people realised that you could use the slide to cover mechanic for speed and since then the developers have doubled down on that by providing more options to preserve momentum while sliding in and out of cover and made Gears a fast paced shooter.

 

[808s & Villainy]

Then you have to fight an horde of white bokoblins with a branch.

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Did some of you just never learn how to play the game at all? How are you going through all your weapons so quickly??

 

[bomma man]

Throughout Metal Gear Solid 5, you extract enemies to have them come and work on your base, developing weapons and fighting for you and such. Developing the highest level items naturally requires you to have staff of the highest possible rank. But those staff don't spawn in the normal offline game world at all, so your only options are to steal them from other players online, which is inconsistent and sometimes not possible, or buy them with points from completing (again, online) events. It becomes basically pointless to extract enemies from the overworld or play non-lethally, even though the game's story heavily encourages non-lethal play (kill too many enemies and your PC becomes permanently covered in blood), and nearly defeats the point of playing the offline portion of the game at all.

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Did they patch this in later? I don't think I ever engaged with the online stuff outside the tutorials and my only bottleneck was fuel (plus the insane timers).

 

[Dogui]

Does hitting your own characters in order to level stats in Final Fantasy II count?

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I like to think people irl would train and "be strong" fighting between them. Tho you would need to use your imagination to think a party member aren't attacking the other one in a "violent" manner like he would against a monster lol

It was corrected in the gba port but tbh i liked to "grind" this way.

 

[jem]

I await the day anyone that worked at 343 ever says "Sprint wasn't supposed to make the game faster, just trick you into thinking it was"

Unless that's already happened and I've missed it.

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It's nothing to do with trickery.

We're just talking about different aspects of gameplay.

The problem with your argument is that you've limited your definition of gameplay to the macro scale, i.e: the pace of the match, whether or not a player dies in a given encounter etc.

I'm talking about micro gameplay - the moment to moment gameplay, the interaction of the player with the controls and their avatar, gamefeel.

Sprint is not a mechanic designed to decrease the length of a match, which is effectively what you're arguing. It's a mechanic designed to increase the speed of a player and thus make the game feel faster.

 

[Ostron]

It's nothing to do with trickery.

We're just talking about different aspects of gameplay.

The problem with your argument is that you've limited your definition of gameplay to the macro scale, i.e: the pace of the match, whether or not a player dies in a given encounter etc.

I'm talking about micro gameplay - the moment to moment gameplay, the interaction of the player with the controls and their avatar, gamefeel.

Sprint is not a mechanic designed to decrease the length of a match, which is effectively what you're arguing. It's a mechanic designed to increase the speed of a player and thus make the game feel faster.

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I don't think I'm putting words in that poster's mouth when I say that's not at all what the argument was. I think you've misunderstood.

 

[Nuclear Muffin]

APCs in Advance Wars were supposed to be for carrying slow moving troops, instead they're used as bait.

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This was actually fixed in Advance Wars 2; the AI no longer prioritises APCs over everything else.

Was hilariously exploitable in the original game though!

 

[jem]

I don't think I'm putting words in that poster's mouth when I say that's not at all what the argument was. I think you've misunderstood.

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At it's core, that is exactly what his argument is.

I've seen the same argument many many times.

How else do you define the pace of a match?

 

[Sesha]

SotN's EXP system is actually broken, as it scales downward the EXP you get from enemies as you level up. I imagine the idea is so that you can't just keep grinding on easy enemies.

The problem is that, by the time you reach level 70 or so, every enemy gives you 1 EXP, so you're stuck just killing Spectral Sword over and over again.

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Suikoden and Vandal Hearts (1, at least) have similar systems. Konami devs really liked this implementation for their RPG leveling systems, it seems.

 

[Prolepro]

It's nothing to do with trickery.

We're just talking about different aspects of gameplay.

The problem with your argument is that you've limited your definition of gameplay to the macro scale, i.e: the pace of the match, whether or not a player dies in a given encounter etc.

I'm talking about micro gameplay - the moment to moment gameplay, the interaction of the player with the controls and their avatar, gamefeel.

Sprint is not a mechanic designed to decrease the length of a match, which is effectively what you're arguing. It's a mechanic designed to increase the speed of a player and thus make the game feel faster.

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but then they have to just make the levels bigger to accomodate for the speed change or the maps would be too small



so the "feel" doesnt mean anything even in the context of what it's supposed to be doing

thrusting is a much more substantial and actually interesting change, even though I dont know if it's what I prefer to old Halo, but that's a whole different conversation

EDIT: Also... youre literally doing what youre accusing that other poster of doing by limiting the topic to your frame of "micro gameplay", sprinting affects both.

 

[jem]

but then they have to just make the levels bigger to accomodate for the speed change or the maps would be too small



so the "feel" doesnt mean anything even in the context of what it's supposed to be doing

thrusting is a much more substantial and actually interesting change, even though I dont know if it's what I prefer to old Halo, but that's a whole different conversation

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Ignoring the fact that that video is highly flawed, the perception of speed (ie: the feel) is not just the time it takes to cross a given space.

The player's perception of speed is linked to the relative size of your avatar to the environment as well as how quickly you can move around it.

For example, take the argument the video poses and flip it around. If you were to take Halo 3 and halve the size of the environments and the player's speed then it'd take exactly the same time to cross a given level. However, the game would feel slow as fuck.

You're literally covering more ground when sprinting so it feels faster.


On another note, the audiovisual effects of sprint also contribute to making it "feel" faster - that is 'trickery' though as previously described.

 

[Prolepro]

Ignoring the fact that that video is highly flawed, the perception of speed (ie: the feel) is not just the time it takes to cross a given space.

The player's perception of speed is linked to the relative size of your avatar to the environment as well as how quickly you can move around it. You're literally covering more ground when sprinting so it feels faster.

For example, take the argument the video poses and flip it around. If you were to take Halo 3 and halve the size of the environments and the player's speed then it'd take exactly the same time to cross a given level. However, the game would feel slow as fuck.

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You could elaborate why you feel it's flawed beyond just saying it is, but the video literally just showed how the bolded isnt true...

You cover the same amount of ground in the same amount of time without an animation eating your potential movement options.

Your hypothetical is a false equivalency, because the speed/scale isnt halved in Halo 2 vs. Halo 5. The video demonstrates that.

So when there's no mechanical component to sprint making the game "faster", youre arguing that the aesthetic of it just makes the game "feel" faster for... reasons, I guess.

And the point is that not only does it not make it faster, but this "feel" actually makes the game pace slower overall in the grand scheme of things, but youre also ignoring that while saying that the poster has a "limited view" or whatever.

If its purpose was to "make the game feel faster", I have no reason to see how that's true. 343i Halo doesnt feel faster to me anecdotally, but we can see that there are concrete reasons for that without just personal tastes being taken into account.

 

[NHarmonic.]

Did some of you just never learn how to play the game at all? How are you going through all your weapons so quickly??

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??? Did you play it? High tier weapons aren't specially durable except for some of the lynel stuff. And i thought the idea of the game was to use all the tools?

However, running out of good weapons and having to rely on skel-arms, branches, bombs and stasis was one of the most boring things in the game. And it doesn't help that enemy variety was small and encounters were quite similar. So different from something like Horizon, were you have your arsenal but every creature is so different that you have to adjust how to play whenever you go against them.

 

[NightShift]

Intentional or not, it's still a shitty system.
It's not fun. It's not difficult.
It's tedious and annoying.

The mechanic will likely vanish in the sequel, and for good reason.

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I hope you're wrong because I'm really liking it and if they get rid of it, I feel like the sequel will be missing a lot that makes so much of the game work so well.

I don't think it's likely to going to vanish though. The game wouldn't have got such an overwhelmingly positive reception if enough people hated it that much.