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

(+) Yeah! (+)

action52 posted...

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.

I assume you mean nasir.

Yeah, he was qualified, but unfortunately wasn't familiar with the RPG genre and wasn't given a lot of time. It's amazing that he was able to get the game to run at all given the NES wasn't built with that kind of game in mind. It's a little more complicated than a simple side scrolling platformer or racer. Most of the bugs in FF1 are more a matter of the code being unfinished than flawed. Though a good example of a genuine oversight is how it saves the game before restoring spell charges.

pegusus123456 posted...

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.

That is incredibly interesting. Traces of this behavior can sometimes be observed in-game or with addons (like sometimes you see the blue question mark on the map representing a once-per-day treasure, because the game is "invisibly" tracking it as a daily quest). If you look up some things on WoWHead as well a search can turn up lots of weird results, like if you search for "[Monster]" it will come up with "MonsterQuestPathTracking(1)" etc.

Never heard about the invisible rabbits thing though. Can you point me to a source where I can read on that in more detail?

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.

Alrighty Lydia is going back to bikini mode

Skyrim's Fortify Restoration loop.

See: most of Spiffing Brit's videos on the game where he does things like enchant one of the few pieces of silverware in the game that counts as a weapon to do a million fire damage or some such, and then proceeds to spoon dragons to death in a single whack.

Dark_Arbron posted...

That is incredibly interesting. Traces of this behavior can sometimes be observed in-game or with addons (like sometimes you see the blue question mark on the map representing a once-per-day treasure, because the game is "invisibly" tracking it as a daily quest). If you look up some things on WoWHead as well a search can turn up lots of weird results, like if you search for "[Monster]" it will come up with "MonsterQuestPathTracking(1)" etc.

Never heard about the invisible rabbits thing though. Can you point me to a source where I can read on that in more detail?

GTA V uses invisible flying trucks as cameras.
https://twitter.com/LucasIsPersonal/status/1548293552546885644

Why program something new into a game when you can just rely on the convoluted use of things already there to achieve something similar and involving the lives and deaths of thousands of digital rabbits?

Foppe posted...

LOCK ... Always misses.

This tickles me.

There's a glitch in final fantasy legends 1 where the chainsaw will instantly kill the final boss God

The train ride in Fallout 3 was actually a NPC with a train hat.

https://youtu.be/9uJLU539NA8?t=302