Current Events > What are some silly/unintuitive hidden mechanics in games?

(+) Yeah! (+)

For example today I found out that, in Skyrim, equipping combat skills boosting apparel on your follower (such as a necklace with 'your one-handed attacks do 15% more damage', or a hood with 'your damage from bows is increased by 20%' etc.) doesn't actually do anything. They only work for your character.

I love idle animations. If theres a game where the playable character doesnt start stretching, yawning, and then dozing off if you dont touch the controller for a minute or two, the developer fucked up.

Memory leaks

There was a similar mechanic in Diablo 2 if memory serves.

My answer would be in the SNES version of FF VI, all the bugs. A bunch of the stats dont do anything, Magical Evade counts for both physical too, so if you get max Magic Evade you cant be hit. Vanish makes magic hitting a guarantee, so Vanish / Doom or Vanish / X-Zone will kill any boss in the game. List goes on.

K181 posted...

I love idle animations. If theres a game where the playable character doesnt start stretching, yawning, and then dozing off if you dont touch the controller for a minute or two, the developer fucked up.

Sonic CD takes this to the extreme.
If you leave it for nearly 3 minutes or so, Sonic says Im outta here, jumps off the screen and you lose all lives and get an instant game over.

Dark_Arbron posted...

Sonic CD takes this to the extreme.
If you leave it for nearly 3 minutes or so, Sonic says Im outta here, jumps off the screen and you lose all lives and get an instant game over.

Ha, that's amazing

Dark_Arbron posted...

Sonic CD takes this to the extreme.
If you leave it for nearly 3 minutes or so, Sonic says Im outta here, jumps off the screen and you lose all lives and get an instant game over.

Thats just dickish, though. Thats akin to if the next Marvel films stinger was tubgirl for some reason.

Bomb arrows in gameboy Zeldas

Chip N Dale Rescue Rangers - Super Throw (throw the ball in a boss room to the side. Catch it when it ricochets and throw it again to get a super throw)

Super C - Charged fire shot (hold B and release to shoot a powered up fire shot)

Super Mario Galaxy 1 & 2 - Homing ground pound

Megaman X and X2 - Shots fired while dashing so double damage. Possibly an oversight as it was removed from X3 onward.

In Princess & Conquest, a porn game based on the old 4chan tower girls meme/series, if you have sex too often you can trigger the apocalypse.

You can finish Far Cry 4 during the introduction by waiting long enough for Pagan Min to come back with crab rangoon

In one of the Tenchu games if you werent careful around certain enemies you yourself could get stealth killed. I always thought that was neat.

Sonic 3. That barrel. You know the one

FF7 original, you can get support materia like Hp absorb to work with 4x cut materia by liking it with master command materia but be careful pairing added cut with master command since if you use an item on you the added cut is going to target you

Joelypoely posted...

For example today I found out that, in Skyrim, equipping combat skills boosting apparel on your follower (such as a necklace with 'your one-handed attacks do 15% more damage', or a hood with 'your damage from bows is increased by 20%' etc.) doesn't actually do anything. They only work for your character.

but they work if those enchantments are equipped on a followers weapon

majin_nemesis posted...

but they work if those enchantments are equipped on a followers weapon

Yep, that's quite bizarre right.

K181 posted...

Thats just dickish, though. Thats akin to if the next Marvel films stinger was tubgirl for some reason.

Are you unfamiliar with the monkey's paw?

In Xenoblade 2, there's a hidden range mechanic where certain weapons are best used at certain ranges, and if you're at the right range it boosts the damage you deal. It's unintuitive though because many of your attacks make you move in certain directions which can get you out of the sweet spot.

Edit: There's also a hidden camera-lock feature when in battles if you click in the right stick. It resets if you tilt the stick at all though, but it makes for some unique strafing animations.

The hidden third ending to The Witchs House.
Instead of doing all the puzzles to get the potion that kills the thorny bush blocking the way, just wait an hour real time and it will die.

CRON posted...

You can finish Far Cry 4 during the introduction by waiting long enough for Pagan Min to come back with crab rangoon

Dark_Arbron posted...

The hidden third ending to The Witchs House.
Instead of doing all the puzzles to get the potion that kills the thorny bush blocking the way, just wait an hour real time and it will die.

I like these kind of small Easter eggs. But yes they are a bit silly.

Level being tied to the success rate of stealing in final fantasy 6/7. In 6 it's impossible to steal a item if Locke's level is to much lower then the target. In 7 it's impossible to get a rare steal if your level is to much higher then the targets because it checks for the common steal first and you end up with 100% steal chance.

Speaking of FF, the original release of FF12. Pretty much ALL OF IT.

Zodiac age also had an invisible bow that was the strongest weapon hidden in an airport in an invisible chest with a SUPER LOW rate.

Goldice posted...

Sonic 3. That barrel. You know the one

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BJzYJtqpGKQ

EVs and IVs in Pokemon have certainly given me the most overall vexation through the years.

Koudelka.

It's a turnbased RPG/horror game. One of the stats is Piety, which is basically your magic defense. High piety = take low damage from spells.

But it also lowers the amount a healing spell would heal.

Always thought that was silly, though it also makes sense when you think about it.

You can more or less level entire villages and towns of NPCs in games like the classic Ultima series or Divine Divinity/Divinity OS - and as far as I know - not make the game unwinnable.

100% chameleon completely breaks Oblivion.

PraetorXyn posted...

My answer would be in the SNES version of FF VI, all the bugs. A bunch of the stats dont do anything, Magical Evade counts for both physical too, so if you get max Magic Evade you cant be hit. Vanish makes magic hitting a guarantee, so Vanish / Doom or Vanish / X-Zone will kill any boss in the game. List goes on.

A fun fact about FF6 is that the "blind" status is bugged so that it has no effect on you. There is an item in the game called goggles that prevents blindness, but since blindness is a meaningless status effect, in FF6 it is literally true that THE GOGGLES DO NOTHING.

Grenade jumping.
Namely, in Borderlands, I kept a low-level sticky grenade mod with me in that'd equip whenever I wanted to grenade jump to heard-to-reach or inaccessible places.
For those who don't know, grenade jumping is to literally utilize a grenade's explosion to increase jumping height and distance, usually at the cost of player health. In Borderlands, however, the shield absords the damage, and it recharge after a few seconds anyhow, so the only meanignful loss would be the grenade(s) spent.

Goldice posted...

Sonic 3. That barrel. You know the one

Fuck yes.

I played Sonic 3 many, many, MANY times, and only heard about the "correct way" something like 3 years ago.

This part was always the biggest pain in the ass for the whole game, simply because I didn't know the easy way.

calling for support in MGS games
it makes me sad that no game(s) copied codec calls that made mgs special to me
the random dialogues and the voice acting was pretty damn good too

I always thought drop/steal rates were weird.

Like they're never coded with simple percentages. It's always layers of tables cross-referencing eachother with various slots for different tiers of items that may ot may not interact/conflict with each other.

Seems like a hell of a lot of work to obfuscate something that minmaxers are going to figure out anyway and casuals don't give a shit about <_>

Making broken equipment in Rune Factory.

every metal gear

Leveling up jobs in Dragon Quest 6 and 7.
Instead of using JP like Final Fantasy 5 or something similar, every area has a Level Cap. If your character is under said Level Cap and you win a battle in that area, you get 1 Experience towards that job (with most needing 150-250ish to max the job). The only way to know what the Level Cap is (aside from just looking it up) is by running all the way back to Alltrades Abbey after a battle after every level up.
On top of that, the Level Caps are different depending on what version of each game you play.

TetsuoS2 posted...

every metal gear

Yeah every Metal Gear game since MGS has had some bizarre, silly game mechanics. Hell, every Hideo Kojima game.

The guaranteed goals in earlier nhl games.

Gandhi's love of nukes in civ 5

There's the old "using the fishing rod or bug net to distract the final boss" in Zelda games.

I don't know if this is exactly what you're looking for since it's not something the player does, but WoW is run (or at least used to be run) by invisible creatures (often rabbits). For a lot of things in the game, the easiest way to do it is to create a spell and have an NPC cast that spell. So say a boss has a mechanic where he's firing a laser at you. What's actually happening is that there's an invisible rabbit chasing you, casting a fire spell, and the graphic just follows the invisible rabbit.

The same thing happens with certain quest objectives. They have a very straightforward quest tracking where killing one mob equals one advancement in the quest. But if they have a more unusual quest objective, they can have that action spawn an invisible rabbit that instantly dies which is what the quest is actually tracking.

Mega Man Battle Network's NaviCust bugs aren't always strictly harmful.

For example, the emotion bug from programs like humor will cause your emotion window to cycle through different states, including full synchro and anger which each give you a small time frame to use a double damage chip.

Getting the Zodiac spear in FF12.

evilpresident posted...

Koudelka.

It's a turnbased RPG/horror game. One of the stats is Piety, which is basically your magic defense. High piety = take low damage from spells.

But it also lowers the amount a healing spell would heal.

Always thought that was silly, though it also makes sense when you think about it.

That game also has a mechanic where the higher your skill level with a weapon is, the faster that type of weapon will break.

as much as i love the game, Vagrant Story's entire crafting, weapon, and strength/weakness system belongs in this topic

absolutely makes no sense what weapon will be strong against what enemy. i really doubt anyone has actually figured out how to make it work the way it's supposed to 100% of the time.

Speaking about bugged stats, it is a wonder that Final Fantasy on Nes even runs.
Physical attacks are substantially more powerful on average than they would have been had the correct critical rates been used.
The Intelligence stat is broken, meaning Red Mages are just as powerful spell-casters as White and Black Mages.
Spells are broken.
TMPR (Raises ally's attack by +14) - Does not work at all.
SABR (Raises own Attack by +16 and Accuracy by +10) - Does not work at all.
XFER (Remove elemental resistances) - Does not work unless the target is the party.
LOCK (Lowers an enemy's Evasion by 10) - Always misses.
LOK2 - Instead of decreasing Enemy Evade% by 20, it increases Evade by 20.
HEL2 - Works out of battle as designed, but works like HEL3 in battle

The item House saves the player's progress before it restores their spell charges. So using it without saving wont restore your MP. Loading a savefile and your MP is not full.
Several weapons are also bugged, the weapons intended special effects do not take effect.
There exists a bug where upon level up, the game checks if the Monk/Master has a weapon equipped instead of their armor to determine what formula to use. If they have no weapon equipped, but do have armor on, the game will mistakenly set their defense to their level, as if they were not equipping any armor. This error can be fixed by viewing the armor screen from the pause menu. This bug can also be exploited by granting the Monk/Master special armor properties but using the naturally higher defense of the unarmored Monk (e.g., leveling up with a Ribbon equipped and no weapon, to give the Monk the Ribbon's elemental and status protection but use the Monk's higher natural defense).
Running is supposed to be based on Luck and Level, but is instead based on Luck and the status of the character two positions lower. This means that characters in the top two positions can run perfectly when they have more than 15 Luck and a healthy party member two positions down.
Status ailments inflicted by standard enemy attacks are exempt from items intended to make characters immune to them.
For example, a Knight with an Aegis Shield should be immune to Stone, but a Cockatrice can still turn him to stone as a side-effect of its regular attack.

*goes t a vendor in New Vegas*
*buys a high-end weapon in poor condition for 50 caps*
*buys a low-end weapon at near-max condtion for 30 caps*
*uses low-end weapon to repair the high-end weapon*
*sells high-end weapon back to vendor for 800 caps*

Stealth kills in the first Uncharted game. You do one early on in a tutorial then almost never get a chance to use it again, almost like they completely forgot about the mechanic.

Mass effect 1s armor system. Every armor type had hidden bonuses on it. Example, phoenix armor had health Regen on them.

ffxi has hundreds of items/equipment pieces that have conditional effects (of which the requirements needed to activate are not explained) or outright hidden from the player entirely
sometimes both combined
https://ffxiclopedia.fandom.com/wiki/Latent_and_Hidden_Effects

Foppe posted...

Speaking about bugged stats, it is a wonder that Final Fantasy on Nes even runs.

It runs because the people in charge at Square hired professional, experienced programmers to do things like graphics, sound, and the game engine. They knew they were fucked if that wasn't working, so they paid to make sure all of that was done right.

But when it came time to do things like character stats and the magic system, they decided to save money by having their own staff (who knew little to nothing about programming) do it themselves.

That's why the magic, stat, and combat systems have so many bugs in the first few Final Fantasy games (especially FF1) but everything involved in making the game run properly has no problems. They were programmed by two different teams of people, only one of which was really qualified.

Dmc 3's stun/launch mechanic for devil triggered enemies. The stun and knockback values for each attack and what was needed for each enemy to keep relaunching them for a juggle was unknown for a few years. So early players went at it blind pretty much.

Think it was through cheat engine that the values were discovered.