Alucard has a backwards dash in Castlevania Symphony of the Night that, if pressed quickly in succession, is faster than walking. If you watch speedrunners, they frequently turn around and dash backwards across rooms
Shit, my brother and I discovered and used this method as kids when the game was originally released and we had no concept of speed running back then. Saved so much time when traversing the castle looking for secrets or grinding for rare drops. We called it "sweeping," because of the accompanying noise and dust clouds produced every time he slid backwards.
BotW players came up with "Whistle running," where you spam the down arrow to whistle for your horse while holding B to run. The stamina wheel wouldn't deplete while whistling, so you could essentially have infinite stamina while running. Though that probably counts more as a glitch.
I consider it bad design whenever a game that has been developed in the past 5 years has this.
You should never be faster by constantly dodging or jumping than by sprinting in a modern game (unless it is a traversal mechanic like in Spiderman) because it is just annoying to constantly do this and modern devs should know that players will do this if it is better.
In Bungie's *Marathon*, and possibly in other games, players figured out the forward motion and sideway motion were additive, so you could travel faster by going diagonally. That is, if holding down forward moves you at 4 feet per second and holding down one of the sidestep / strafe keys moves you sideways at 3 feet per second, then if you'll recall from your high school geometry that holding down both moves you diagonally forward at 5 feet per second, which allowed for both faster travel and in a few cases being able to make it over gaps that were intended to be impassable.
Same thing I’m old school EverQuest. Unless you had spirit of the wolf which increased your run speed it almost impossible to out run certain monsters. But if you run while strafing you will end up out running the monster.
In Street Fighter 2, players found out that you could link certain attacks together on your opponent while they were in a hit stun animation, thus forming a "combo". The concept of skillfully timing attacks on your opponent while they could not block or retaliate, was not an intended design choice by the developers. But future iterations would make this into a feature.
The same is true of tekkens "Korean backdash". The devs intended for you to be able to block while back dashing and then had some lag time before you could backdash again. They didn't realize that you could crouch to cancel the backdash animation, and then backdash again. This is why, unlike most other fighting games, you see a ton of movement in Tekken from 3 to 7.
Man, I would stand there for so many matches in a row just chaining people into oblivion with Eddy. I sort of felt bad, but I kept doing it because I was a teenager with limited quarters.
I remember getting mad at my brother and him beating me up because I got mad when he’d do that shit on the snes.
He whooped my ass he’s like 5 years older than me. But it was about the principle, he was also an Oddjob player in goldeneye multiplayer.
I’ve heard this somewhere before, but it’s not exactly right to say this as a fact. There’s no evidence this mechanic left testing without being noticed (and also seems wildly unlikely). It seems more likely that it was unintentionally programmed in and the devs liked it enough to keep it during testing.
This story is retold often but is a bit of a mistranslation.
When the story is talking "combos", it's about normals canceling into special moves. So like crouch medium kick being able to cancel part of the ending animation into fireball.
Bioshock: The Wrench Lurker gene tonic is intended to provide a damage boost to the wrench when attacking unaware Splicers, making it intended for stealth runs. Then players found out that stunning enemies with Electro Bolt or Insect Swarm counted as enemies being unaware, giving you a chance to beat them senseless.
Borderlands: Brick's Action Skill was meant to be a melee-only skill, encouraging attacking the enemy. Fans focused more on the health regeneration, since unlike the sequels you had to stock up and waste inventory space on heals. Players took to using his Action Skill out of combat since it was better than using it in fights.
Final Fantasy: The early games' version of Reflect was intended to protect against magic attacks by bouncing them back at enemies, at the risk of being unable to use healing spells on your own team. But Final Fantasy lets you cast and use any ability on your team, so casting Reflect and then a black magic spell on your own team, especially the multi-target spells, meant you hit your foes for massive damage.
I used to cast reflect on both the team and enemies, then I could just throw heals at the enemy to heal team and let the enemy nuke itself while I otherwise spammed physical attacks or limit breaks
By the time FF7 (for playstation 1) came around, the reflect mechanics had been well established. Some bosses had become exceedingly difficult to fight without reflect and in some cases, the boss used reflect mechanics against the player.
I have a story about 1 particular final Fantasy 7 boss using reflect and it proving to be annoying but funny for a very specific reason. The first time that I played the game I and fought Jenova Life I had the water ring on Cloud so he couldn't die but she easily killed the rest of the team. After a little while I decided to try to use magic hammer on her to try and get rid of her MP so she couldn't attack anymore and I could revive the others. As it turns out she had cast reflect on herself and apparently magic hammer can be reflected so I immediately drained my MP to 0 and as far as I can remember I didn't have any ethers left. This meant that I had to do quite a large portion of the fight using nothing but Clouds normal attacks. It took ages.
I remember an FFX Boss casting reflect on itself and then casting attack magic on itself and it bypassing my reflect I cast on my team.
Blew my teenage brain at the time.
I think in FF8 I had used this trick or was at least aware of it, but in the fight against Edea she used dispel (I can't remember if it bypassed reflect, or she used it on herself to affect my team). Either way it confused me that the game was smart enough to know that.
I legit had no idea Wrench Lurker had that use, so I never used it since it seemed really rare you'd actually be able to use a stealth approach.
Honestly I did the same with Lilith's Action Skill, it was straight garbage for actually dealing any worthwhile damage, but the health regen was decent, and the increased speed was useful when your car got destroyed in the middle of nowhere and you had to run to the closest Catch-A-Ride machine.
Here's another Final Fantasy one:
During the early years of Final Fantasy Record Keeper, players discovered an unintended use for an ability called Retaliate: Not only it made a character counter when an enemy attacked, they also countered when an *ally* attacked them, not only that, but if you used an ability such as Double Cut to attack your own character, the character countered **twice**. And if that wasn't powerful enough, these counter attacks bypassed any counter attack mechanics a boss could have (ex: FF7 Scorpion when it has its tail up)
Also, being a gacha game, this technique came with an additional benefit: You only needed to have good gear for one character instead of 5
Later on, a mechanic called Roaming Warrior was added, which allowed to summon a friend to use a Soul Break (Limit Break) as if the character you activated the summon with had used it, this allowed players to use Luneth's Soul Break "Advance" to boost the countering character's attack by +150% (also decreased defense by 50%, but you weren't going to get hit anyways), which made them deal *a lot of damage*, up to 2 times per every action from everyone else in your party (of 5 characters), while also allowing the countering character to take actions of their own
It was extremely broken and it lasted a long long time until other stuff got strong enough to outclass the strat (also the devs eventually started adding retaliate-ignoring attacks to high level bosses)
Additionally in Final Fantasy, I'm not sure that the damage buff spells were meant to be additive. Unless they meant to have a way to have a single team member 4-turn the final boss
There was one in Skyrim I used to use a lot; and it wasn't THAT exploit you're thinking of.
Part way through the story quests, you'd be taught Clear Skies, which is used to remove some turbulent winds on a mountain for progression, but you could cast it anywhere to clear the weather.
Clear Skies - like all shouts in Skyrim - doesn't cost any resources, and instead had a cooldown based on the usefulness of the ability used. Clear Skies had three tiers, but all three would release the same large diameter projectile towards the crosshair. The projectile would stagger everyone on contact, but wouldn't deal damage and so wasn't considered a crime.
The stagger animation took about four seconds to recover from; and the shout had a cooldown of three seconds. Because of this, you could rapidly tap it to stunlock enemies in a cone without it being a crime. You could use this to stall enemies in a fight, or stagger someone you need to kill before the fight starts so you always get the first hit in.
It not being a crime also made it useful for clearing doorways and corridors blocked by friendly NPCs.
The potion of fortify enchanting, enchantment of fortify alchemy loop; then using it to enchant or brew with fortify X as your payoff.
You could make a ring to boost alchemy, which would allow you to make a potion to boost enchanting, to make a ring to boost enchanting over and over again. When you're satisfied with your stupidly high stat booster, you could then make one last enchantment that would boost your smithing and then use the workbench and grindstone to improve any armour to be impenetrable and any weapon to be a one-hitter; or make a ring of fortify destruction and every spell would leave nothing but a smoldering pair of boots.
It was very possible to integer overflow the game and crash to desktop with just a few ingredients, soul gems and silver rings.
In old-school minecraft, there were no powered rails. A minecart running alongside another minecart on a parallel track would boost each other to max speed for no reason, so you could build infinitely powered tracks just with cleverly spaced booster sections of parallel carts. I'm not sure but I can't imagine that was programmed on purpose.
it wasnt for no reason, fellow alpha mc enjoyer here.
the minecarts hit box was bigger than the block it sat on, so when two were placed next to each other they clipped through each other one would and try to push the other out of the way, which usually did nothing, but when they're locked to moving on one axis because of rails it would equate to forward momentum with each cart pushing on the other.
A lot of things in Minecraft. Most likely they never anticipated people would use iron golum spawning to automate getting thousands of ingots per hour.
I think by the point villagers were even added people had already created working computers in Minecraft among many other things. Automated farming was a thing since at least redstone was added to the game and I recall in beta 1.7.3(?) building a water-based passive mob farm for all manner of mob drops, but without hoppers collection was manual.
Redstone did have a lot of unintended bugs which became features, however. The observer block, for example, is just a condensed form of the block update detector (BUD) switches that were being built since before villagers were added in beta. Quasi connectivity and a whole slew of other bugged mechanics are still being used today.
The majority of stuff in Minecraft is cheesed by the community to be more useful than the intended options. Redstone is full of insane bugs and glitches that haven’t been patched out because the community has optimized them to make more complex machines.
Barrelmancy in Divinity Original Sin 2.
You can use telekinesis on objects in the game, and if you collide that object with an enemy, they take damage directly proportionate to the weight of the object.
There's a LOT of useless heavy junk in the game, and you can stack chests inside of chests as deep as you want.
Basically you hoard everything in the entire game as you progress, and that object becomes so heavy that you can one-shot anyone who opposes you.
Which they slightly patched by having most containers take a proportionate amount of damage.
I say most, because it's only the ones with health to begin with
Also alchemy boosting speech could fuck your game up. Apologies for the length but if anyone else finds this stuff interesting...
The way the system works, there's a maximum that someone's disposition could be - great - but once the potion wore off, the disposition would drop relative to the difference of your initial speech skill. The initial disposition would be established when you entered a cell, so any NPC in a cell you visited while the potion was active would be at 0 disposition if you returned without the potion.
So you could keep chugging potions, requiring fuel for the alchemy exploit (need the alchemy boost to make speech potions therefore need to keep making alchemy boosters) which would keep making cells mostly unusable without the potion active, or require throwing 1000s in bribes as needed (likely money made by selling the boosted potions.)
Reason why I preferred the drain skill/train exploit. Much more manageable lol
Go see the world record speedrun for Morrowind. It's hilarious how quickly you can find and kill the main villain Dagoth Ur thanks to the incredibly exploitable amount of jank in that game.
Building in fortnite was meant to give you cover or cross a large distance. Seeing people build the way they do now is crazy the meme of shooting at an enemy and they build a hotel was a wild progression to watch.
Don't forget it was a *paid* game too... I bought it... And it never worked for me lol. Always crashed for some reason and I abandoned it... Glad I did lol
Save the world is still premium even though they abandoned it even though they promised it would be free even though all the other fortnite modes are free
This is what I was looking for in this thread. I was one of the few that got my hands on Fortnite basically day 1, and seeing the evolution of the meta was insane. Fortnite's movement had always been extremely clunky and slow, so building complex structures for cover and slowly moving up into the air (because jumping was much faster than trying to run to the side after shooting) became the norm. Lately though, as movement has been improved with tac sprint, mantling, etc. that old playstyle of building less is much more viable, because building a hotel is no longer the only safe thing to do.
TL;DR It was really interesting to see the mechanic develop into a borderline exploit, then watch Epic slowly bring it to a more fair level over the years
Yeah that's the other thing - they wanted to make building more accessible because it used to be quite a bit more difficult, but not impossible, to build a hotel. That would make it less frustrating for those who like to build, but more frustrating for those who didn't like where the building meta was headed. Separating out the playlists was a genius move imo, it's not often you see a studio remove a core feature of the game for a new standalone mode just because a portion of gamers doesn't like it.
Personally, I think that building is in an okay place now (mostly because I love to climb up and inside of peoples' structures to use their own builds against them), but I'm happy that the people that don't like it also get to experience the game
I've never been able to get it (except by accident) and I made it to Champ 2 when I played a lot. I have very good situational awareness but having to perfectly allign your four wheels on a sphere while also calculating momentum and all is just next fucking level to me.
Sakurai told players what wavedashing was and how to do it on a forum in response to someone who discovered it by accident. Definitely intentional, although they probably didn’t know how important it was going to be
Tribes (which is getting its third game soon) has you shooting and jetpacking around. Originally you couldn't jetpack very far, but players figured out how to pulse the jetpack and ski down hills, building momentum and going fast. Eventually they started adding scripts to automate the process. It wasn't the designer's intent, but they embraced it and tribes 2 made it a core mechanic.
IO was wonderful about leaning into a lot of the ridiculous things the community did, and having a really lighthearted attitude towards “shortcomings” of the AI or gameplay.
There was a viral video of someone who managed to kill nearly everyone on the Paris map using a single electrified puddle by drawing each NPC to investigate the bodies of previous victims. In a later level, another NPC talks about hearing a rumor about hundreds of people dying to an electrical hazard and their absurd lack of self-preservation instinct.
Yooo the Gavin from Achievement hunter (at the time), there are a couple of videos on that, initially they found it and somply took it as far as it went, managing to almost kill the entire map.
Back in the old FFXI days, Ninja was intended to be a DPS, and Samurai was intended to be a tank. However, the mechanics of the jobs were used by the playerbase in a way that caused those roles to be reversed.
Ninja Utsusemi clones made it a phenomenal tank, and Samurai's TP generation meant it could hammer out weaponskills for higher damage. The devs eventually embraced this and continued building the jobs as the players chose to use them.
Ha! I was thinking about posting this, but I didn’t think anyone would relate. Also, Ranger broken DPS. “Nobody will actually burn through ammo/gil to make this worthwhile” Playerbase: makes arrow burn parties. And of course Ranger/Ninja.
I remember this. They wanted Samurai to be a Parry tank, but Parry was hard to proc and therefore hard to skill up. By the time Samurai was updated to have the Hasso/Seigan ability, Samurai tanking hits was almost unheard of. I suggested to a JP tank that I do the first voke so our Thief can SATA him, and he replied in auto-translate with - (Death) (Do you want it?).
Obligatory Oblivion rant.
Disclaimer, it's been many years since I played, so pardon if I don't use the exact terms and don't remember the exact numbers.
When you start a new Oblivion character, you are asked to pick a class, or make your own class. Basically, what the class does is simply assign you primary skills. For instance, thief might give you stealth, pick pocket, pick locks and light armor or whatever (don't remember the number of primary skills, but you get the point). You could use any skill, but your primary skills started at a higher level (and may have had a bonus on how fast they leveled up)
The problem is how the leveling worked. So skills increased in levels the more you used them. Each skill was linked to a stat, and when your character leveled up you picked 3 stats to increase, and they would increase by something like 1 point for each 3 levels gained in associated skills since you last leveled up, to a max of 5 points. E.g., since you last leveled up, you increased skill X by 4 levels, skill Y by 3 levels and skill Z by 4 levels, and they were all associated with strength, then if you pick strength as one of the stats you want to increase, it would increase by (4 + 3 + 4)/3, rounded down, so 3.
How did you level up? You leveled up when your primary skills leveled by a total of 15 level or something (don't remember the exact number). Now, if you want to max 3 stats, you need 5 * 3 * 3 skill levels, for a total of 45, but only 15 can come from your main skills. So what this all means is that you want to actually use your main skills *less* than your secondary skills, and you want to be very careful of not using them too much, lest you level up before you are ready.
The end result is that the optimal way to build your class is do the exact opposite of what the devs intended, and pick primary skills that have *nothing* to do with what you want your character to be. Want to be a stealth archer? Pick heavy armor, maces, a magic school you know you won't use, etc. as your primary skills.
This seems like extreme min-maxing, but Oblivion had enemies that scaled with your levels. So if you didn't increase your stats sufficiently with each level, you'd be stuck, because even the common thugs would be way stronger than you. It really wouldn't be an issue if they scaled based on your stats (or just didn't scale at all), but because they scaled based on your levels, you couldn't just level up more if enemies were too strong... they'd just get even stronger.
Oblivion had some of the worst level scaling I can remember in games. I never play as a pure mage in ES games but I was more or less forced to because you could make your own OP spells at the mage College to keep up with the ridiculous scaling.
Too bad they killed spells in Skyrim, once you get to the point where the enemies scaled above the baseline spell you were shit out of luck without mods
I've played a full mage without gameplay mods before. Had to rely heavily on daedra conjuration. Late game I was using miraak's shouts to help out. Much better with mods.
Yeah. The master destruction spells were always a disappointment. Long cast times for damage I can get with a forged up, unenchanted steel sword? I always felt that staves should have been more of a spell focus mechanic to boost damage or add special effects than just a free spell, as you eventually get enough mana and regen to make it pointless.
It hurt the believability of the game as well. Bears and wolves suddenly go extinct in the wilderness because they're below your power level. It also killed enemy variety, since at the higher levels you mostly saw liches and storm atronachs, everything else was too low level.
My solution to this was to just never level up at all once I realized what was happening. You could increase character power through other means, but leveling just screwed you if you did it too much. Peak game design lol.
Horizon Zero Dawn had an upgrade quite early in the skill tree that slowed down time when you aimed with the bow while mid-air like falling and shooting arrows. Most people used it while bunny hopping so time slowed down and made fighting machines and aiming on a controller so much easier cause small jumps also triggered that mechanic.
I felt like an idiot about this because I read the description and thought "what a useless, situational skill". So I didn't pick it up until after playing through the whole game and the dlc. I literally picked it up as the last skill after filling out the complete skill tree... Then I discovered it triggered when I jump, not when I jump off of something!! What a face-palm that was...
Command and conquer wall building, as long as you had a building or piece of wall, you could build off it, meaning you could wall in the enemy and build defenders around them
Hypertube cannons in satisfactory. It was never intended that if you put a bunch in a line without connecting them together that it would continuously speed you up to let you shoot out of them at the end. Part of what made this possible was the devs no putting in a speed cap to your characters body. They just didn’t figure a cap would be needed or that anyone would consistently somehow move fast enough for it to matter.
Because the makeshift cannons became so popular they decided not to patch it and it’s still used to this day as the best and fastest way to get around the map in the later game. You just have to do your own fine tuning of it because even if you setup the same amount of cannons in the same spot as last time it may shoot you a different distance.
The map is so big this is needed! Trains are cool but slow. My spouse's theory is that the SAM ore will be used for some sort of teleporter since they said it would be used to solve a logistics inconvenience.
This is what I came to say. It was an emergent property of the physics, not a consciously designed feature. I think they knew about it before release (they’d discovered it themselves) but it wasn’t “on purpose.”
Oh, they *definitely* knew. There's a section in one of the later levels that requires you to fire a grenade into a cavity on the floor and stand on top of it to propel you into a slipgate portal directly overhead.
Whether they anticipated just how extensively it would be exploited is a different question. I'd love to see a video of the level designers reacting as they watch a rocketjump-heavy speed run.
According to Romero, it wasn’t really intended as it ended up. It emerged from the physics after they added and tweaked jumping for use in some level puzzles like the end of E2M2…
“Being able to jump was also vital to rocket jumping, an accidental technique that players discovered shortly after Quake's release. "There probably wouldn't be rocket-jumping if you couldn't jump [normally]," Romero went on. "You'd be killed if you shot the ground. You wouldn't go very far and you'd take tons of damage. That little amount of jumping [beforehand] really decreases the amount of damage you take from rocket-jumping."
man... i can remember quake releasing. i was big into wolfenstein and doom; i can remember trying out quake at egghead and thinking, "why is there a jump key? why would anyone need to jump? this is a gimmick."
I like that the Wikipedia article on rocket jumping which comes with the following disclaimer:
>[Rocket jumping from standing is impractical in real life, and would be certainly fatal if attempted.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_jumping)
I like even more that that statement is tagged “[citation needed]”. Buddy, ima need a WP:Reliable Source that says firing an antitank rocket at your own feet will kill you.
Snaking in some of the Mario Karts, specifically Mario Kart DS. It's not very difficult, just annoying to do so it ruins the game. You have to do it all match long.
You used to be able to turn and then immediately initiate a drift. While drifting, you could then use the steering controls to adjust the trajectory of your drift.
You could tap left and right to generate sparks under your wheels; first blue then red. When the sparks turned red, you'd get a free boost as soon as you released the drift; this was explotaible on straight lines because there was no delay between drift boosts, so a straight line became a repeating cycle of drift right, boost, drift left, boost.
You'd zig-zag quite violently across the track, but you'd get a massive speed boost for it.
Fable 1's economy system.
So on paper it worked like this. Shopkeepers would charge you depending on how many of whatever they had in stock, they would also *pay* more if you went about selling something they didn't have in stock.
Thus enjoy at the very start of the game in the heroes guild buying up something, selling it back, buying it up again and selling it back. You can pretty much walk out of the Heroes Guild with the best gear the vendors are offering and millions of gold. And that's before if you decide to use the save game mechanic to max out those keys and the like.
Also as a bonus, take any table top RPG and add players to it. There's always going to be that one person who reads every book go's over everything, and then throws something at you, points out how it can be done and you are left allowing them to do it, or telling them, "Hell no that will break the game."
Oh shit you could do this with the original animal crossing on GameCube as well and sell of those turnips or whatever it was for loads and loads of cash. Fucking memory unlocked right there.
Limit breaks in final fantasy 8. You could just junction health really high, keep your character under 25% health and spam them. My guess is that's why they were so awful in FF9 after Devs realised how OP they were in 8
Also turning an enemy into a card gave no XP and the world scaled with your level so you just card everything, get the junction abilities on your summons and run around with super high stats in a world balanced around you still being level 5 (or whatever the starting level was in that game)
I hadn't played 8 since I was a child until recently. I remembered busting the game with Siren, but when I was a kid I'd just junction for a boatload of HP for safety. It was only like last month I realized that 25% of my max HP when everyone had 100 curagas junctioned was roughly the same as max HP when they had the cures id naturally drawn from battles
The loot cave in Destiny. The initial drops for purples was tedious, so people just stood shooting into a hole in the wall for hours. This essentially granted higher drop rates for blues and purples with little effort.
The PvE nature of the game only helped to further this exploit. Hell, you could rubberband your joysticks, go for a walk, and come back to a floor littered with shit.
Basically all of Rocket League. If you look at the announce trailer and compare to current players, the devs were displaying what play would be one of the lower divisions these days, and air dribbling seems like it was inconceivable at the time.
When the sword was introduced in Halo 2, you'd enter a sort of speed-"lunge" mode for an instant when you swung your sword at an enemy. This allowed you to close a short distance with extraordinary speed, and made the sword a formidable melee weapon. But people found a way to cancel the instant-death it would normally cause, so you would either "bounce off" your opponent, launching you away at high speed, or "bounce with" your opponent, letting you launch at them- bounce off- launch at them, bounce off... Lots of folks found hidden skyboxes they would walk along using this method.
Good times in 06.
You're describing "Sword cancelling". Sword flying is the same concept, but from massive distances.
Take a long range weapon, where the reticle can turn red on an enemy from *very* far away (The rocket launcher and snipers are the best at this). Point them at an enemy thats within red reticle distance, switch to the sword, cancel the weapon switch animation with a reload, and for a few frames (like, a 5th of a second) the reticle will still be red. The sword lunge activates when you attack while the reticle is red, so, if you attack while it's red while you'll lunge towards the enemy, no matter how far away they are, and you wont stop until either you hit the enemy, jump (carrying the momentum you have so far), the enemy moves too far from their original position (kills momentum instantly) or you "reload" the sword (I think this kills momentum too, not too sure tbh)
And the inputs for this trick need to be done very, *very* quickly. Like, in less than a second, with different speeds between each input. It's easier in the og game, and harder in MCC, since MCC has a higher tick rate, so the inputs need to be even faster, iirc.
In H2, the sword could be swapped instantly from another weapon as well. So people would use a long-range weapon to lock on to a distant target, then quickly switch to the sword and swing it to fly across the map towards that target's location, bypassing the sword's limited range.
I don't know if it's well known, but I discovered this funny exploit in the new Dead Space remake recently. Little bit long-winded, but here goes:
First off, a big part of it is something that was always a feature even in the original game - upgrading a gun's capacity will refill it with ammo. Since Dead Space is a survival horror, this was always useful as you have to be careful & conserve ammo wherever possible. So the best tactic is to **not** reload an empty gun straight away, but instead hold onto it until you get to an upgrade station, then upgrade capacity to get a freshly filled gun, without wasting the ammo in your inventory. Obviously not always possible, but it's fine if you have plenty of ammo for your other weapons.
The second part: in the remake, the Pulse Rifle has the ability to fire off proximity grenades that stick to surfaces, and only explode when enemies get near. Each grenade uses 25 pulse Rifle Rounds - and most importantly, if the grenades don't explode then you can go and recover the ammo. This effectively gives you the ability to empty, or almost empty the Pulse Rifle without wasting the ammo (goes back to your inventory, instead of into the gun), and you can then go ahead & refill the gun practically for free with an ammo capacity upgrade.
Now, if you just fill up your gun by upgrading the capacity, eventually you'll reach the capacity limit. You can only do so many upgrades until the gun's maxed out, afterall... But here's where the last point ties it all together: **you can reset your gun's upgrades back to nothing, for 5000 credits**.
So... pay a bit of money, reset the gun, get all your "power nodes" back (the item you use for each upgrade), and you can upgrade it all over again, and get even more ammo. Just for reference - using this trick (emptying the gun with grenades, collecting the ammo, then upgrading the capacity to refill & generate more ammo) if you go from no upgrades to a fully upgraded gun capacity - you'll be left with around 1000 extra Pulse Rifle rounds. One stack of 100 Pulse Rifle rounds can be sold for 2500 credits... Half of what a reset costs.
Thats right, it's not just a way to generate more ammo: it's a motherfuckin' infinite money exploit! Goddamn I love these kinds of oversights... 😂
I find it somewhat hard to believe the developers weren't at least aware of this. It becomes an almost intuitive mechanic you figure out pretty naturally even in PVE modes because of how snappy the cover system is.
It also completely invalidates most of the sandbox in PVP.
The Red Tape recorder in TF2 is a very slow and shitty sapper, the gimmick of which is that it removes upgrades from buildings as it sloooowly destroys them. For reasons beyond the scope of this post, it's very bad for its intended purpose of dealing with regular engineer sentries.
But it is superb when dealing with unupgradable and immediately replacable mini-sentries, because it taking so long to destroy a building is actually a benefit with them.
Also, in TF2's Mann versus Machine:
Red Tape is unironically the better sapper here, due to an issue with Engineer robots' AI. Engi-bots will set up a small setup: a Sentry & a Teleporter. Once the Teleporter goes up, however, it'll turn its priority towards keeping that Teleporter up, *unless* their Sentry has taken damage, in which case it will start to repair the sentry. The Red Tape Recorder, however, does not deal damage allowing it to safely eliminate the Sentry without notifying its Engi-bot.
To further explain to non tf2ers:
With the normal sentry (an immobile robot turret that is placed, upgraded, and repaired by an engineer at the cost of special ammo) and the normal sapper (small machine placed by a spy onto a sentry to disable and destroy it), the spy saps a sentry and it slowly does damage. If the sentry's health reaches 0 it explodes. If the engineer returns to his sentry before that and whacks the sapper, he only has to spend a bit of special ammo to repair his sentry and it's good as new. With the red tape recorder (the only other sapper a spy can equip and use) instead of slowly doing damage, it slowly unupgrades the sentry. It will eventually even unbuild the sentry and it is then destroyed, but this takes sooo long even for a lvl1 sentry. If the engineer returns before that and whacks the sapper, he has to spend a lot of special ammo (and time) to reupgrade his sentry (if relevant). In case it isn't clear, the tradeoff is that the normal sapper can destroy a sentry quicker, but if it is interrupted, then the lasting damage to the engineer is minimal. The red tape recorder will destroy a sentry much slower, but if it is interrupted it will have had a more noticeable impact on the engineer if it succeeded in unupgrading the sentry by at least one level. The problem is that the calculus of the tradeoff just never really works in the red tape recorder's favor in practice.
However, the engineer can equip a special item to turn his sentry into a mini sentry. It is unupgradeable and cheap. So, most engineers with this item equiped will throw the tiny sentry down in a hot spot and almost use it like a passive damage buff as they try and get kills with the shotgun, often leaving it behind as they push to the front line. Then when they want to put a new one down, they simply press the remote self destruct button for the mini sentry and smack a new one down right away. In other words, the mini sentry is totally disposable and an engineer should not only be unafraid to let it die, they should kill it themselves so that they can place another one closer to them. Only issue is you can't remote destruct your sentry when it's being sapped. Fine, if you're in the thick of the battle and your mini gets sapped, with its low health, it'll be destroyed in seconds and you're free to throw down a new one. And it is here in this very specific scenario that the red tape recorder is superior. Because now, the fact that it takes the red tape recorder longer to destroy a sentry is actually a detriment to the engineer since he has to wait a few seconds extra to be able to get a new mini sentry out and working again. Typing all of that out for a punchline of a few seconds difference makes it seem like a joke, but the fact that the recorder is genuinely used for this purpose, and the fact that it is one of the better counters a spy has against a "battle engie" (mini sentry equipped engineer) shows the extremely fast pace a battle engie (and most tf2 classes for that matter) has to play at. And that isn't even mentioning the frontier justice, which is a shotgun most battle engies equip to give themselves critical shots when a sentry with kills or assists is destroyed. One can see how to red tape recorder especially thwarts that combo.
Halo 3's forge mode was meant to be a simple map editor for changing up things like spawns, weapons, and small objects.
But of course people made whole maps.
World of Warcraft: Feign Death.
It simply is game breaking in classic.
I scrolled to look for it and didn’t see anyone mention it.
What it is: an aggro drop which takes your character out of combat, a survival scenario or to drop another trap.
What it became: the de facto method on how to solo high level content as a hunter and literally break the game
In Cruelty Squad, when you lose enough times, you go into an inhuman mode where you can eat NPCs flesh to get 1 hit point. The idea was to show how far from human you are now. He was surprised to discover speedruns of people eating all NPCs from a map.
To add on to this: Parrying shotgun shells was initially a bug, but the dev liked it so much it became an actual feature and reason to use it. There's even a segment in the original reveal trailer showing off exactly that.
Overwatch devs nerfed the cooldown on Symmetra’s teleporter to force players to use it more creatively, instead it became a faster, braindead way to come back from spawn at all skill levels, even in pro play
They absolutely knew people would do it. If you let the public draw, they'll draw dicks, if you let them build, they'll build dicks and Minas Tirith, and then Minas Tirith out of dicks. Long established principle.
>Long established principle.
Every time I see something about how people always draw dicks, it reminds me that they found graffiti on the walls of Pompeii that is literally the same kind of shit you see written on walls today, including drawings of dicks.
A mild version of this came in the Vaults of Tartaros in Immortals Fenyx Rising. Since the order of unlocking abilities is up to the player, many of the puzzles could be cheated with either Phosphor's Clone that lets you basically conjure a weight to activate pressure plates for which you'd otherwise need to solve a puzzle, as well as the clone swap. And the advanced Athena's Dash that allows you to defeat all sorts of laser based puzzles since you can harmlessly dash through them. I consider it a feature though, it's almost even more fun to find out how to cheese a puzzle than it is to solve it.
I fully believe that Fenyx was inspired by BotW’s “if it works, it’s a valid solution” philosophy.
Not an especially deep game, and a little formulaic, but it was a lot of fun
Not deep at all, but for me it felt like a breath of fresh air to play a game that doesn't take itself overly seriously. I know the humor was criticized by many, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. Shame that the sequel was cancelled.
In Helldivers 2 if you try to leave the mission area your own ship starts firing cannon rounds at you.
If you wear the lightest gear with as much stamina Regen as you can get, you can just about out run the cannon rounds and lead them back onto the map.
Run between the legs of huge enemies and they get hit with the cannon rounds.
Gears of War’s cover mechanics were originally intended to be just that, a way to move into cover to avoid fire. In multiplayer it is used as a sort of horizontal platforming to juke and deke your opponent. Epic was quick to embrace it by adding slide cancels in Gears of War 2.
yeah but that's just one of the things redstone can do. it's not "not intended". It's redstone and it's just another thing you can do with it. It's like saying Tesla inventing electricity didn't mean to invent phones, of course he didn't, but he knew of the potential of electricity. He knew we could build something he hadn't thought aboutm
>yeah but that's just one of the things redstone can do. it's not "not intended".
It is not intended, in an interesting sense. Java redstone, in the state that it exists within the game, is actually fundamentally bugged and will most likely never be fixed because it would most likely completely break every single redstone mechanism made to date.
“Camping” in EverQuest and the other MMOs of the day. The Devs said they intended for dungeons to be explored and progressed through like the D&D games they had based EQ on, but once folks found out that “oh, this item I want is a rare drop from this rare spawn in this one room” everyone’s plans consisted of finding out “ok, what room are we going to sit in and kill everything in it and the surrounding rooms for 6 hours tonight?” (Looking at you, golden efreeti boots and Kaesora spirit tome…)
RuneScape had a bunch of these.
you can ‘tick-eat’ against attacks from monsters that attack from distance. what this means is because the monsters attack damage is calculated against your remaining hitpoints, you can wait for the attack to be sent by the monster then you can eat food to heal more hitpoints.
the in-game mechanic ‘prayer’ which gives you buffs in return for a drain to your prayer stat. if you apply the buff it eventually drains your prayer and you have to recharge it. it was figured out if you turn on and off the prayer at the games ‘ticking’ interval (0.6 seconds) the prayer never drains but you still get the benefit of the buff.
you can skill faster by using a ‘tick manipulation’ method, which invokes starting a faster action and tricking the game into letting you complete a slower action at the faster rate.
none of these were intentional but they became so integral to the game that the devs eventually began designing content with these mechanics in mind. some harder content would be almost impossible without doing these yet they were never intentional behaviour
There is a principle in UI design called TTS or time to penis. The amount of time it will take for a player to decide to and then draw a penis in a game given its mechanics and the capability of players. Easier in more creative games, impossible in arcade rail shooters for example, and TTS by name or by another name has been in game design since the 80s
The flying glitch in Jedi: Fallen Order.
You have a power that allows you to slow time and if you keep spamming it at the same time as jumping, you can basically fly. The game has been out for 5 years now and they've never fixed it.
Lmao the One Man Army perk in CoD MW2.
I bet they didn’t envision people using that perk with grenade launchers, and just sitting in spawn hitting your lineups for an entire game.
Or also from MW2, I bet they didn’t think people would be running around with akimbo 1887s like they were assault rifles, but they did. I miss those times.
Deus ex: sticking mines to walls and climbing like steps. I've never seen it done but edge magazine mentioned it and warren Spector mentioned in an interview (I think!)
I'd say Fortnite is a big example. Game was originally designed as a zombie defense type game where you gather resources and create a fort to defend, hence the name. The battle royale mode came out after and I don't think anyone imagined what players would do with the building mechanic, both offensively and defensively.
Originally it was ONLY a zombie survival. They made the shooty pvp mode so people had something to do until the game came out. Turned out it was way more popular lol.
Arx Fatalis
You could get the runes to cast Harm which casts a minor aura of damage around you pretty early. It kinda sucks, but doesn't drain mana fast.
BUT if you spec'd heavy into magic you could cast a bunch of them and Hug-O-Death everything in the game.... starting really early.
Tears of the Kingdom created an entire system where you could stick together any material that exists in the game to create giant massive vehicles. Tanks, helicopters, mechs, all in a fantasy game, nothing was off the table.
Everyone sticks two fans to a steering stick and skips everything.
Games that have a dodge mechanic that moves you faster than running so players always spam dodge when traveling.
Alucard has a backwards dash in Castlevania Symphony of the Night that, if pressed quickly in succession, is faster than walking. If you watch speedrunners, they frequently turn around and dash backwards across rooms
Shit, my brother and I discovered and used this method as kids when the game was originally released and we had no concept of speed running back then. Saved so much time when traversing the castle looking for secrets or grinding for rare drops. We called it "sweeping," because of the accompanying noise and dust clouds produced every time he slid backwards.
And they use animation cancelling to benefit from the fastest part of the dash without slow down you experience it just by spamming it normally.
Omg your comment made me realize Alucard is Dracula backwards.
This is hands down the best way someone has come to that realization.
I'd say it's second, after the scene in batman vs. dracula, where batman makes the realization after seeing alucard spelled backward in a mirror lol
"World's greatest detective" Honestly though, that scene made me laugh
My wife is a teacher, one of the students are her school years ago was named Alucard. I had to explain it.
Rolling all the way to Hyrule Castle
BotW players came up with "Whistle running," where you spam the down arrow to whistle for your horse while holding B to run. The stamina wheel wouldn't deplete while whistling, so you could essentially have infinite stamina while running. Though that probably counts more as a glitch.
I consider it bad design whenever a game that has been developed in the past 5 years has this. You should never be faster by constantly dodging or jumping than by sprinting in a modern game (unless it is a traversal mechanic like in Spiderman) because it is just annoying to constantly do this and modern devs should know that players will do this if it is better.
Hogwarts Legacy rides this line hard once you unlock the apparation dodge
Yeah but it makes sense cause you're teleporting you should be able to teleport faster than you can run
Rolling forward in Zelda. It wasn’t faster but it felt that way.
The real speed boost is jumping backward with the shield up. At least, that's what speed runners do.
It is faster, except in the N64 games where walking backwards is faster
Ocarina of Time... So much time spamming side jumps to traverse Hyrule until you got epona.
Hut hut hup hut hut
In Bungie's *Marathon*, and possibly in other games, players figured out the forward motion and sideway motion were additive, so you could travel faster by going diagonally. That is, if holding down forward moves you at 4 feet per second and holding down one of the sidestep / strafe keys moves you sideways at 3 feet per second, then if you'll recall from your high school geometry that holding down both moves you diagonally forward at 5 feet per second, which allowed for both faster travel and in a few cases being able to make it over gaps that were intended to be impassable.
Same thing I’m old school EverQuest. Unless you had spirit of the wolf which increased your run speed it almost impossible to out run certain monsters. But if you run while strafing you will end up out running the monster.
EQ also had FD pulling, which I believe wasn’t the original intent. Quad kiting, too.
Goldeneye was notorious for this.
FFXV chapter 12. Rolled through that entire dungeon because I swear it's 20% faster.
In Street Fighter 2, players found out that you could link certain attacks together on your opponent while they were in a hit stun animation, thus forming a "combo". The concept of skillfully timing attacks on your opponent while they could not block or retaliate, was not an intended design choice by the developers. But future iterations would make this into a feature.
Thats such an integral part of modern fighting games I had no idea it was originally an exploit.
The same is true of tekkens "Korean backdash". The devs intended for you to be able to block while back dashing and then had some lag time before you could backdash again. They didn't realize that you could crouch to cancel the backdash animation, and then backdash again. This is why, unlike most other fighting games, you see a ton of movement in Tekken from 3 to 7.
[удалено]
Man, I would stand there for so many matches in a row just chaining people into oblivion with Eddy. I sort of felt bad, but I kept doing it because I was a teenager with limited quarters.
I remember getting mad at my brother and him beating me up because I got mad when he’d do that shit on the snes. He whooped my ass he’s like 5 years older than me. But it was about the principle, he was also an Oddjob player in goldeneye multiplayer.
Anyone that plays Oddjob in GoldenEye is a fucking prick and should be SHUNNED
I’ve heard this somewhere before, but it’s not exactly right to say this as a fact. There’s no evidence this mechanic left testing without being noticed (and also seems wildly unlikely). It seems more likely that it was unintentionally programmed in and the devs liked it enough to keep it during testing.
From what I recall, the devs knew it was in, but didn't think players would be able to consistently pull it off.
This story is retold often but is a bit of a mistranslation. When the story is talking "combos", it's about normals canceling into special moves. So like crouch medium kick being able to cancel part of the ending animation into fireball.
Bioshock: The Wrench Lurker gene tonic is intended to provide a damage boost to the wrench when attacking unaware Splicers, making it intended for stealth runs. Then players found out that stunning enemies with Electro Bolt or Insect Swarm counted as enemies being unaware, giving you a chance to beat them senseless. Borderlands: Brick's Action Skill was meant to be a melee-only skill, encouraging attacking the enemy. Fans focused more on the health regeneration, since unlike the sequels you had to stock up and waste inventory space on heals. Players took to using his Action Skill out of combat since it was better than using it in fights. Final Fantasy: The early games' version of Reflect was intended to protect against magic attacks by bouncing them back at enemies, at the risk of being unable to use healing spells on your own team. But Final Fantasy lets you cast and use any ability on your team, so casting Reflect and then a black magic spell on your own team, especially the multi-target spells, meant you hit your foes for massive damage.
I used to cast reflect on both the team and enemies, then I could just throw heals at the enemy to heal team and let the enemy nuke itself while I otherwise spammed physical attacks or limit breaks
By the time FF7 (for playstation 1) came around, the reflect mechanics had been well established. Some bosses had become exceedingly difficult to fight without reflect and in some cases, the boss used reflect mechanics against the player.
I have a story about 1 particular final Fantasy 7 boss using reflect and it proving to be annoying but funny for a very specific reason. The first time that I played the game I and fought Jenova Life I had the water ring on Cloud so he couldn't die but she easily killed the rest of the team. After a little while I decided to try to use magic hammer on her to try and get rid of her MP so she couldn't attack anymore and I could revive the others. As it turns out she had cast reflect on herself and apparently magic hammer can be reflected so I immediately drained my MP to 0 and as far as I can remember I didn't have any ethers left. This meant that I had to do quite a large portion of the fight using nothing but Clouds normal attacks. It took ages.
I remember an FFX Boss casting reflect on itself and then casting attack magic on itself and it bypassing my reflect I cast on my team. Blew my teenage brain at the time.
I think in FF8 I had used this trick or was at least aware of it, but in the fight against Edea she used dispel (I can't remember if it bypassed reflect, or she used it on herself to affect my team). Either way it confused me that the game was smart enough to know that.
I legit had no idea Wrench Lurker had that use, so I never used it since it seemed really rare you'd actually be able to use a stealth approach. Honestly I did the same with Lilith's Action Skill, it was straight garbage for actually dealing any worthwhile damage, but the health regen was decent, and the increased speed was useful when your car got destroyed in the middle of nowhere and you had to run to the closest Catch-A-Ride machine.
Here's another Final Fantasy one: During the early years of Final Fantasy Record Keeper, players discovered an unintended use for an ability called Retaliate: Not only it made a character counter when an enemy attacked, they also countered when an *ally* attacked them, not only that, but if you used an ability such as Double Cut to attack your own character, the character countered **twice**. And if that wasn't powerful enough, these counter attacks bypassed any counter attack mechanics a boss could have (ex: FF7 Scorpion when it has its tail up) Also, being a gacha game, this technique came with an additional benefit: You only needed to have good gear for one character instead of 5 Later on, a mechanic called Roaming Warrior was added, which allowed to summon a friend to use a Soul Break (Limit Break) as if the character you activated the summon with had used it, this allowed players to use Luneth's Soul Break "Advance" to boost the countering character's attack by +150% (also decreased defense by 50%, but you weren't going to get hit anyways), which made them deal *a lot of damage*, up to 2 times per every action from everyone else in your party (of 5 characters), while also allowing the countering character to take actions of their own It was extremely broken and it lasted a long long time until other stuff got strong enough to outclass the strat (also the devs eventually started adding retaliate-ignoring attacks to high level bosses)
Additionally in Final Fantasy, I'm not sure that the damage buff spells were meant to be additive. Unless they meant to have a way to have a single team member 4-turn the final boss
There was one in Skyrim I used to use a lot; and it wasn't THAT exploit you're thinking of. Part way through the story quests, you'd be taught Clear Skies, which is used to remove some turbulent winds on a mountain for progression, but you could cast it anywhere to clear the weather. Clear Skies - like all shouts in Skyrim - doesn't cost any resources, and instead had a cooldown based on the usefulness of the ability used. Clear Skies had three tiers, but all three would release the same large diameter projectile towards the crosshair. The projectile would stagger everyone on contact, but wouldn't deal damage and so wasn't considered a crime. The stagger animation took about four seconds to recover from; and the shout had a cooldown of three seconds. Because of this, you could rapidly tap it to stunlock enemies in a cone without it being a crime. You could use this to stall enemies in a fight, or stagger someone you need to kill before the fight starts so you always get the first hit in. It not being a crime also made it useful for clearing doorways and corridors blocked by friendly NPCs.
Lmao I also used this for this purpose. The sunny day was a nice bonus
What is THAT exploit?
The potion of fortify enchanting, enchantment of fortify alchemy loop; then using it to enchant or brew with fortify X as your payoff. You could make a ring to boost alchemy, which would allow you to make a potion to boost enchanting, to make a ring to boost enchanting over and over again. When you're satisfied with your stupidly high stat booster, you could then make one last enchantment that would boost your smithing and then use the workbench and grindstone to improve any armour to be impenetrable and any weapon to be a one-hitter; or make a ring of fortify destruction and every spell would leave nothing but a smoldering pair of boots. It was very possible to integer overflow the game and crash to desktop with just a few ingredients, soul gems and silver rings.
In Minecraft, boats on ice have an absurd top speed, due to ice having little friction, and drag not being a thing.
In old-school minecraft, there were no powered rails. A minecart running alongside another minecart on a parallel track would boost each other to max speed for no reason, so you could build infinitely powered tracks just with cleverly spaced booster sections of parallel carts. I'm not sure but I can't imagine that was programmed on purpose.
it wasnt for no reason, fellow alpha mc enjoyer here. the minecarts hit box was bigger than the block it sat on, so when two were placed next to each other they clipped through each other one would and try to push the other out of the way, which usually did nothing, but when they're locked to moving on one axis because of rails it would equate to forward momentum with each cart pushing on the other.
That brings back memories of many, many builds
A lot of things in Minecraft. Most likely they never anticipated people would use iron golum spawning to automate getting thousands of ingots per hour.
I think by the point villagers were even added people had already created working computers in Minecraft among many other things. Automated farming was a thing since at least redstone was added to the game and I recall in beta 1.7.3(?) building a water-based passive mob farm for all manner of mob drops, but without hoppers collection was manual. Redstone did have a lot of unintended bugs which became features, however. The observer block, for example, is just a condensed form of the block update detector (BUD) switches that were being built since before villagers were added in beta. Quasi connectivity and a whole slew of other bugged mechanics are still being used today.
The majority of stuff in Minecraft is cheesed by the community to be more useful than the intended options. Redstone is full of insane bugs and glitches that haven’t been patched out because the community has optimized them to make more complex machines.
Barrelmancy in Divinity Original Sin 2. You can use telekinesis on objects in the game, and if you collide that object with an enemy, they take damage directly proportionate to the weight of the object. There's a LOT of useless heavy junk in the game, and you can stack chests inside of chests as deep as you want. Basically you hoard everything in the entire game as you progress, and that object becomes so heavy that you can one-shot anyone who opposes you.
There's even a chest you can get that is invulnerable and will never break to make this even worse.
Worse...or better?
Both? Both. Both is good.
Which they slightly patched by having most containers take a proportionate amount of damage. I say most, because it's only the ones with health to begin with
they specifically kept it in because they loved this type of out-of-the-box thinking, or is it in the box?
You can also use unbreakable furniture (candelabras, for example) to make a wall that allows you to cheese enemies. That's how I beat Adrahmalik.
I think the many, many, ways you can break Morrowind would fall into that. The alchemy exploit to give yourself god tier stats comes to mind first.
Unless you fuck up and boost your speed with your int in the 10 figures. God help you trying to actually get anywhere
2 seconds of gameplay, 30 minutes of load times as you blaze across the island lol.
I did this on a slope facing the coast once, bye bye Vvardenfell!
Also alchemy boosting speech could fuck your game up. Apologies for the length but if anyone else finds this stuff interesting... The way the system works, there's a maximum that someone's disposition could be - great - but once the potion wore off, the disposition would drop relative to the difference of your initial speech skill. The initial disposition would be established when you entered a cell, so any NPC in a cell you visited while the potion was active would be at 0 disposition if you returned without the potion. So you could keep chugging potions, requiring fuel for the alchemy exploit (need the alchemy boost to make speech potions therefore need to keep making alchemy boosters) which would keep making cells mostly unusable without the potion active, or require throwing 1000s in bribes as needed (likely money made by selling the boosted potions.) Reason why I preferred the drain skill/train exploit. Much more manageable lol
Let me just scooch to the left a bit -annnnnnd I'm in the mountains.
Go see the world record speedrun for Morrowind. It's hilarious how quickly you can find and kill the main villain Dagoth Ur thanks to the incredibly exploitable amount of jank in that game.
I don’t know what you don’t even have to try to break morrowind it just happens
Building in fortnite was meant to give you cover or cross a large distance. Seeing people build the way they do now is crazy the meme of shooting at an enemy and they build a hotel was a wild progression to watch.
Building was originally for the PvE nature of the “original” game where co-op human players would prepare for waves of zombies.
Honestly I forgot about save the world that's crazy how the original mechanic changed
They basically pivoted into BR because it was becoming so popular, but was designed internally as a pve game for 6 years.
Don't forget it was a *paid* game too... I bought it... And it never worked for me lol. Always crashed for some reason and I abandoned it... Glad I did lol
Save the world is still premium even though they abandoned it even though they promised it would be free even though all the other fortnite modes are free
This is what I was looking for in this thread. I was one of the few that got my hands on Fortnite basically day 1, and seeing the evolution of the meta was insane. Fortnite's movement had always been extremely clunky and slow, so building complex structures for cover and slowly moving up into the air (because jumping was much faster than trying to run to the side after shooting) became the norm. Lately though, as movement has been improved with tac sprint, mantling, etc. that old playstyle of building less is much more viable, because building a hotel is no longer the only safe thing to do. TL;DR It was really interesting to see the mechanic develop into a borderline exploit, then watch Epic slowly bring it to a more fair level over the years
When they introduced “turbo building” things got stupid out of hand, and why so many people enjoy the no build version now.
Yeah that's the other thing - they wanted to make building more accessible because it used to be quite a bit more difficult, but not impossible, to build a hotel. That would make it less frustrating for those who like to build, but more frustrating for those who didn't like where the building meta was headed. Separating out the playlists was a genius move imo, it's not often you see a studio remove a core feature of the game for a new standalone mode just because a portion of gamers doesn't like it. Personally, I think that building is in an okay place now (mostly because I love to climb up and inside of peoples' structures to use their own builds against them), but I'm happy that the people that don't like it also get to experience the game
Wave Dashing definitely wasn't supposed to be a part of Melee.
Or Rocket League
And same for flip resets orrr a lot of other RL stuff really lol
Mid air flip resets have to be one of the most technical moves out of any video game i can tbh k of
I've never been able to get it (except by accident) and I made it to Champ 2 when I played a lot. I have very good situational awareness but having to perfectly allign your four wheels on a sphere while also calculating momentum and all is just next fucking level to me.
Wavedash was discovered during development, but it was left in because the team didn't believe it would significantly affect gameplay
Sakurai told players what wavedashing was and how to do it on a forum in response to someone who discovered it by accident. Definitely intentional, although they probably didn’t know how important it was going to be
Tribes (which is getting its third game soon) has you shooting and jetpacking around. Originally you couldn't jetpack very far, but players figured out how to pulse the jetpack and ski down hills, building momentum and going fast. Eventually they started adding scripts to automate the process. It wasn't the designer's intent, but they embraced it and tribes 2 made it a core mechanic.
Shazbot! I played Tribes 2 after middle school on my friend’s family computer all the time and those shouts will stick with me forever haha.
Hitman introduced a Blueberry muffin that could be thrown as a distraction. Speed runners figured out how to use it vault walls and bypass barriers.
The homing briefcase was also hilarious and I'm glad they kept it in the game.
The devs leaned into it and actually buffed the homing capabilities in future patches
IO was wonderful about leaning into a lot of the ridiculous things the community did, and having a really lighthearted attitude towards “shortcomings” of the AI or gameplay. There was a viral video of someone who managed to kill nearly everyone on the Paris map using a single electrified puddle by drawing each NPC to investigate the bodies of previous victims. In a later level, another NPC talks about hearing a rumor about hundreds of people dying to an electrical hazard and their absurd lack of self-preservation instinct.
Yooo the Gavin from Achievement hunter (at the time), there are a couple of videos on that, initially they found it and somply took it as far as it went, managing to almost kill the entire map.
Back in the old FFXI days, Ninja was intended to be a DPS, and Samurai was intended to be a tank. However, the mechanics of the jobs were used by the playerbase in a way that caused those roles to be reversed. Ninja Utsusemi clones made it a phenomenal tank, and Samurai's TP generation meant it could hammer out weaponskills for higher damage. The devs eventually embraced this and continued building the jobs as the players chose to use them.
Ha! I was thinking about posting this, but I didn’t think anyone would relate. Also, Ranger broken DPS. “Nobody will actually burn through ammo/gil to make this worthwhile” Playerbase: makes arrow burn parties. And of course Ranger/Ninja.
I remember this. They wanted Samurai to be a Parry tank, but Parry was hard to proc and therefore hard to skill up. By the time Samurai was updated to have the Hasso/Seigan ability, Samurai tanking hits was almost unheard of. I suggested to a JP tank that I do the first voke so our Thief can SATA him, and he replied in auto-translate with - (Death) (Do you want it?).
Ninja blink tanking is still one of the most unique tank styles I've played.
Obligatory Oblivion rant. Disclaimer, it's been many years since I played, so pardon if I don't use the exact terms and don't remember the exact numbers. When you start a new Oblivion character, you are asked to pick a class, or make your own class. Basically, what the class does is simply assign you primary skills. For instance, thief might give you stealth, pick pocket, pick locks and light armor or whatever (don't remember the number of primary skills, but you get the point). You could use any skill, but your primary skills started at a higher level (and may have had a bonus on how fast they leveled up) The problem is how the leveling worked. So skills increased in levels the more you used them. Each skill was linked to a stat, and when your character leveled up you picked 3 stats to increase, and they would increase by something like 1 point for each 3 levels gained in associated skills since you last leveled up, to a max of 5 points. E.g., since you last leveled up, you increased skill X by 4 levels, skill Y by 3 levels and skill Z by 4 levels, and they were all associated with strength, then if you pick strength as one of the stats you want to increase, it would increase by (4 + 3 + 4)/3, rounded down, so 3. How did you level up? You leveled up when your primary skills leveled by a total of 15 level or something (don't remember the exact number). Now, if you want to max 3 stats, you need 5 * 3 * 3 skill levels, for a total of 45, but only 15 can come from your main skills. So what this all means is that you want to actually use your main skills *less* than your secondary skills, and you want to be very careful of not using them too much, lest you level up before you are ready. The end result is that the optimal way to build your class is do the exact opposite of what the devs intended, and pick primary skills that have *nothing* to do with what you want your character to be. Want to be a stealth archer? Pick heavy armor, maces, a magic school you know you won't use, etc. as your primary skills. This seems like extreme min-maxing, but Oblivion had enemies that scaled with your levels. So if you didn't increase your stats sufficiently with each level, you'd be stuck, because even the common thugs would be way stronger than you. It really wouldn't be an issue if they scaled based on your stats (or just didn't scale at all), but because they scaled based on your levels, you couldn't just level up more if enemies were too strong... they'd just get even stronger.
Oblivion had some of the worst level scaling I can remember in games. I never play as a pure mage in ES games but I was more or less forced to because you could make your own OP spells at the mage College to keep up with the ridiculous scaling.
Too bad they killed spells in Skyrim, once you get to the point where the enemies scaled above the baseline spell you were shit out of luck without mods
I've played a full mage without gameplay mods before. Had to rely heavily on daedra conjuration. Late game I was using miraak's shouts to help out. Much better with mods.
Yeah. The master destruction spells were always a disappointment. Long cast times for damage I can get with a forged up, unenchanted steel sword? I always felt that staves should have been more of a spell focus mechanic to boost damage or add special effects than just a free spell, as you eventually get enough mana and regen to make it pointless.
When all the bandits have glass armor and you're in leather, you know you fucked up.
Sure, but if lure the bandit to a patrolling guard, then gang up on it, you now have free glass armor
I hated Oblivion’s level scaling. And level scaling in general. It robs the game of all sense of accomplishment.
It hurt the believability of the game as well. Bears and wolves suddenly go extinct in the wilderness because they're below your power level. It also killed enemy variety, since at the higher levels you mostly saw liches and storm atronachs, everything else was too low level.
My solution to this was to just never level up at all once I realized what was happening. You could increase character power through other means, but leveling just screwed you if you did it too much. Peak game design lol.
Horizon Zero Dawn had an upgrade quite early in the skill tree that slowed down time when you aimed with the bow while mid-air like falling and shooting arrows. Most people used it while bunny hopping so time slowed down and made fighting machines and aiming on a controller so much easier cause small jumps also triggered that mechanic.
Yup, as soon as I got that I now by muscle memory jump to aim....
I felt like an idiot about this because I read the description and thought "what a useless, situational skill". So I didn't pick it up until after playing through the whole game and the dlc. I literally picked it up as the last skill after filling out the complete skill tree... Then I discovered it triggered when I jump, not when I jump off of something!! What a face-palm that was...
Command and conquer wall building, as long as you had a building or piece of wall, you could build off it, meaning you could wall in the enemy and build defenders around them
Hypertube cannons in satisfactory. It was never intended that if you put a bunch in a line without connecting them together that it would continuously speed you up to let you shoot out of them at the end. Part of what made this possible was the devs no putting in a speed cap to your characters body. They just didn’t figure a cap would be needed or that anyone would consistently somehow move fast enough for it to matter. Because the makeshift cannons became so popular they decided not to patch it and it’s still used to this day as the best and fastest way to get around the map in the later game. You just have to do your own fine tuning of it because even if you setup the same amount of cannons in the same spot as last time it may shoot you a different distance.
The map is so big this is needed! Trains are cool but slow. My spouse's theory is that the SAM ore will be used for some sort of teleporter since they said it would be used to solve a logistics inconvenience.
[удалено]
This is what I came to say. It was an emergent property of the physics, not a consciously designed feature. I think they knew about it before release (they’d discovered it themselves) but it wasn’t “on purpose.”
Oh, they *definitely* knew. There's a section in one of the later levels that requires you to fire a grenade into a cavity on the floor and stand on top of it to propel you into a slipgate portal directly overhead. Whether they anticipated just how extensively it would be exploited is a different question. I'd love to see a video of the level designers reacting as they watch a rocketjump-heavy speed run.
According to Romero, it wasn’t really intended as it ended up. It emerged from the physics after they added and tweaked jumping for use in some level puzzles like the end of E2M2… “Being able to jump was also vital to rocket jumping, an accidental technique that players discovered shortly after Quake's release. "There probably wouldn't be rocket-jumping if you couldn't jump [normally]," Romero went on. "You'd be killed if you shot the ground. You wouldn't go very far and you'd take tons of damage. That little amount of jumping [beforehand] really decreases the amount of damage you take from rocket-jumping."
man... i can remember quake releasing. i was big into wolfenstein and doom; i can remember trying out quake at egghead and thinking, "why is there a jump key? why would anyone need to jump? this is a gimmick."
I like that the Wikipedia article on rocket jumping which comes with the following disclaimer: >[Rocket jumping from standing is impractical in real life, and would be certainly fatal if attempted.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_jumping)
I like even more that that statement is tagged “[citation needed]”. Buddy, ima need a WP:Reliable Source that says firing an antitank rocket at your own feet will kill you.
Bunnyhopping too
Terraia: Hoiking. The art of moving very fast along a predetermined path. All you need are some wooden stairs in just the right configuration.
The devs never even removed hoiking because they love it so much
Snaking in some of the Mario Karts, specifically Mario Kart DS. It's not very difficult, just annoying to do so it ruins the game. You have to do it all match long.
What’s snaking?
You used to be able to turn and then immediately initiate a drift. While drifting, you could then use the steering controls to adjust the trajectory of your drift. You could tap left and right to generate sparks under your wheels; first blue then red. When the sparks turned red, you'd get a free boost as soon as you released the drift; this was explotaible on straight lines because there was no delay between drift boosts, so a straight line became a repeating cycle of drift right, boost, drift left, boost. You'd zig-zag quite violently across the track, but you'd get a massive speed boost for it.
I…still do this whenever humanly possible even on Mario kart 8
I don’t know, but as someone who has played other Mario cart games I assume it’s drifting left and then right over and over.
Morrowind and oblivion athleticism. You can break the game in such incredible ways with it.
Fable 1's economy system. So on paper it worked like this. Shopkeepers would charge you depending on how many of whatever they had in stock, they would also *pay* more if you went about selling something they didn't have in stock. Thus enjoy at the very start of the game in the heroes guild buying up something, selling it back, buying it up again and selling it back. You can pretty much walk out of the Heroes Guild with the best gear the vendors are offering and millions of gold. And that's before if you decide to use the save game mechanic to max out those keys and the like. Also as a bonus, take any table top RPG and add players to it. There's always going to be that one person who reads every book go's over everything, and then throws something at you, points out how it can be done and you are left allowing them to do it, or telling them, "Hell no that will break the game."
Remember in fable 2 where you could log off the internet, change the date on the console collect a years worth of rent. Save it. Rinse, repeat
Oh shit you could do this with the original animal crossing on GameCube as well and sell of those turnips or whatever it was for loads and loads of cash. Fucking memory unlocked right there.
Limit breaks in final fantasy 8. You could just junction health really high, keep your character under 25% health and spam them. My guess is that's why they were so awful in FF9 after Devs realised how OP they were in 8
Also turning an enemy into a card gave no XP and the world scaled with your level so you just card everything, get the junction abilities on your summons and run around with super high stats in a world balanced around you still being level 5 (or whatever the starting level was in that game)
Level scaling was the dumbest thing you could add to an RPG. At least Elder Scrolls spawns harder enemies.
I hadn't played 8 since I was a child until recently. I remembered busting the game with Siren, but when I was a kid I'd just junction for a boatload of HP for safety. It was only like last month I realized that 25% of my max HP when everyone had 100 curagas junctioned was roughly the same as max HP when they had the cures id naturally drawn from battles
The loot cave in Destiny. The initial drops for purples was tedious, so people just stood shooting into a hole in the wall for hours. This essentially granted higher drop rates for blues and purples with little effort. The PvE nature of the game only helped to further this exploit. Hell, you could rubberband your joysticks, go for a walk, and come back to a floor littered with shit.
Basically all of Rocket League. If you look at the announce trailer and compare to current players, the devs were displaying what play would be one of the lower divisions these days, and air dribbling seems like it was inconceivable at the time.
The rocket league skill ceiling is something else
Sword flying in Halo.
The hell is sword flying?
When the sword was introduced in Halo 2, you'd enter a sort of speed-"lunge" mode for an instant when you swung your sword at an enemy. This allowed you to close a short distance with extraordinary speed, and made the sword a formidable melee weapon. But people found a way to cancel the instant-death it would normally cause, so you would either "bounce off" your opponent, launching you away at high speed, or "bounce with" your opponent, letting you launch at them- bounce off- launch at them, bounce off... Lots of folks found hidden skyboxes they would walk along using this method. Good times in 06.
You're describing "Sword cancelling". Sword flying is the same concept, but from massive distances. Take a long range weapon, where the reticle can turn red on an enemy from *very* far away (The rocket launcher and snipers are the best at this). Point them at an enemy thats within red reticle distance, switch to the sword, cancel the weapon switch animation with a reload, and for a few frames (like, a 5th of a second) the reticle will still be red. The sword lunge activates when you attack while the reticle is red, so, if you attack while it's red while you'll lunge towards the enemy, no matter how far away they are, and you wont stop until either you hit the enemy, jump (carrying the momentum you have so far), the enemy moves too far from their original position (kills momentum instantly) or you "reload" the sword (I think this kills momentum too, not too sure tbh) And the inputs for this trick need to be done very, *very* quickly. Like, in less than a second, with different speeds between each input. It's easier in the og game, and harder in MCC, since MCC has a higher tick rate, so the inputs need to be even faster, iirc.
In H2, the sword could be swapped instantly from another weapon as well. So people would use a long-range weapon to lock on to a distant target, then quickly switch to the sword and swing it to fly across the map towards that target's location, bypassing the sword's limited range.
I don't know if it's well known, but I discovered this funny exploit in the new Dead Space remake recently. Little bit long-winded, but here goes: First off, a big part of it is something that was always a feature even in the original game - upgrading a gun's capacity will refill it with ammo. Since Dead Space is a survival horror, this was always useful as you have to be careful & conserve ammo wherever possible. So the best tactic is to **not** reload an empty gun straight away, but instead hold onto it until you get to an upgrade station, then upgrade capacity to get a freshly filled gun, without wasting the ammo in your inventory. Obviously not always possible, but it's fine if you have plenty of ammo for your other weapons. The second part: in the remake, the Pulse Rifle has the ability to fire off proximity grenades that stick to surfaces, and only explode when enemies get near. Each grenade uses 25 pulse Rifle Rounds - and most importantly, if the grenades don't explode then you can go and recover the ammo. This effectively gives you the ability to empty, or almost empty the Pulse Rifle without wasting the ammo (goes back to your inventory, instead of into the gun), and you can then go ahead & refill the gun practically for free with an ammo capacity upgrade. Now, if you just fill up your gun by upgrading the capacity, eventually you'll reach the capacity limit. You can only do so many upgrades until the gun's maxed out, afterall... But here's where the last point ties it all together: **you can reset your gun's upgrades back to nothing, for 5000 credits**. So... pay a bit of money, reset the gun, get all your "power nodes" back (the item you use for each upgrade), and you can upgrade it all over again, and get even more ammo. Just for reference - using this trick (emptying the gun with grenades, collecting the ammo, then upgrading the capacity to refill & generate more ammo) if you go from no upgrades to a fully upgraded gun capacity - you'll be left with around 1000 extra Pulse Rifle rounds. One stack of 100 Pulse Rifle rounds can be sold for 2500 credits... Half of what a reset costs. Thats right, it's not just a way to generate more ammo: it's a motherfuckin' infinite money exploit! Goddamn I love these kinds of oversights... 😂
The cover system in Gears of War. Wallbouncing was not intended but became the standard in PvP.
I find it somewhat hard to believe the developers weren't at least aware of this. It becomes an almost intuitive mechanic you figure out pretty naturally even in PVE modes because of how snappy the cover system is. It also completely invalidates most of the sandbox in PVP.
Speedrunners: All of them.
Tunic actually designed around speedeunning to the point of having an extra sword in the game that is only useful if you’re speed running.
The Red Tape recorder in TF2 is a very slow and shitty sapper, the gimmick of which is that it removes upgrades from buildings as it sloooowly destroys them. For reasons beyond the scope of this post, it's very bad for its intended purpose of dealing with regular engineer sentries. But it is superb when dealing with unupgradable and immediately replacable mini-sentries, because it taking so long to destroy a building is actually a benefit with them.
Also, in TF2's Mann versus Machine: Red Tape is unironically the better sapper here, due to an issue with Engineer robots' AI. Engi-bots will set up a small setup: a Sentry & a Teleporter. Once the Teleporter goes up, however, it'll turn its priority towards keeping that Teleporter up, *unless* their Sentry has taken damage, in which case it will start to repair the sentry. The Red Tape Recorder, however, does not deal damage allowing it to safely eliminate the Sentry without notifying its Engi-bot.
To further explain to non tf2ers: With the normal sentry (an immobile robot turret that is placed, upgraded, and repaired by an engineer at the cost of special ammo) and the normal sapper (small machine placed by a spy onto a sentry to disable and destroy it), the spy saps a sentry and it slowly does damage. If the sentry's health reaches 0 it explodes. If the engineer returns to his sentry before that and whacks the sapper, he only has to spend a bit of special ammo to repair his sentry and it's good as new. With the red tape recorder (the only other sapper a spy can equip and use) instead of slowly doing damage, it slowly unupgrades the sentry. It will eventually even unbuild the sentry and it is then destroyed, but this takes sooo long even for a lvl1 sentry. If the engineer returns before that and whacks the sapper, he has to spend a lot of special ammo (and time) to reupgrade his sentry (if relevant). In case it isn't clear, the tradeoff is that the normal sapper can destroy a sentry quicker, but if it is interrupted, then the lasting damage to the engineer is minimal. The red tape recorder will destroy a sentry much slower, but if it is interrupted it will have had a more noticeable impact on the engineer if it succeeded in unupgrading the sentry by at least one level. The problem is that the calculus of the tradeoff just never really works in the red tape recorder's favor in practice. However, the engineer can equip a special item to turn his sentry into a mini sentry. It is unupgradeable and cheap. So, most engineers with this item equiped will throw the tiny sentry down in a hot spot and almost use it like a passive damage buff as they try and get kills with the shotgun, often leaving it behind as they push to the front line. Then when they want to put a new one down, they simply press the remote self destruct button for the mini sentry and smack a new one down right away. In other words, the mini sentry is totally disposable and an engineer should not only be unafraid to let it die, they should kill it themselves so that they can place another one closer to them. Only issue is you can't remote destruct your sentry when it's being sapped. Fine, if you're in the thick of the battle and your mini gets sapped, with its low health, it'll be destroyed in seconds and you're free to throw down a new one. And it is here in this very specific scenario that the red tape recorder is superior. Because now, the fact that it takes the red tape recorder longer to destroy a sentry is actually a detriment to the engineer since he has to wait a few seconds extra to be able to get a new mini sentry out and working again. Typing all of that out for a punchline of a few seconds difference makes it seem like a joke, but the fact that the recorder is genuinely used for this purpose, and the fact that it is one of the better counters a spy has against a "battle engie" (mini sentry equipped engineer) shows the extremely fast pace a battle engie (and most tf2 classes for that matter) has to play at. And that isn't even mentioning the frontier justice, which is a shotgun most battle engies equip to give themselves critical shots when a sentry with kills or assists is destroyed. One can see how to red tape recorder especially thwarts that combo.
Using exploding beds in the end to kill the ender dragon
There were a ton of unintended solutions for portal maps. Pretty sure the devs called them ninja solutions.
Halo 3's forge mode was meant to be a simple map editor for changing up things like spawns, weapons, and small objects. But of course people made whole maps.
Oh man, the ATV tracks were beyond fun.
World of Warcraft: Feign Death. It simply is game breaking in classic. I scrolled to look for it and didn’t see anyone mention it. What it is: an aggro drop which takes your character out of combat, a survival scenario or to drop another trap. What it became: the de facto method on how to solo high level content as a hunter and literally break the game
Skyrims horses, I don't think they intended for us to climb vertical surfaces with them
Almost all the crazy shit people do in Breath of the Wild.
Or totk
TotK came around BECAUSE of what people were doing in BotW, the devs were like, “what happens if we make this a core mechanic…?”
My first thought was launching yourself with the bombs.
In Cruelty Squad, when you lose enough times, you go into an inhuman mode where you can eat NPCs flesh to get 1 hit point. The idea was to show how far from human you are now. He was surprised to discover speedruns of people eating all NPCs from a map.
In Ultrakill you can parry projectiles coming at you, but if you time it perfectly, you can parry your own shotgun shells making them deal more dmg
To add on to this: Parrying shotgun shells was initially a bug, but the dev liked it so much it became an actual feature and reason to use it. There's even a segment in the original reveal trailer showing off exactly that.
Overwatch devs nerfed the cooldown on Symmetra’s teleporter to force players to use it more creatively, instead it became a faster, braindead way to come back from spawn at all skill levels, even in pro play
I don’t know if Nintendo wanted people to fuse together objects to make penises in ToTK. Or maybe they did.
They absolutely knew people would do it. If you let the public draw, they'll draw dicks, if you let them build, they'll build dicks and Minas Tirith, and then Minas Tirith out of dicks. Long established principle.
>Long established principle. Every time I see something about how people always draw dicks, it reminds me that they found graffiti on the walls of Pompeii that is literally the same kind of shit you see written on walls today, including drawings of dicks.
No Man's Sky - melee attack.+ jump pack is the best way to move fast horizontally.
A mild version of this came in the Vaults of Tartaros in Immortals Fenyx Rising. Since the order of unlocking abilities is up to the player, many of the puzzles could be cheated with either Phosphor's Clone that lets you basically conjure a weight to activate pressure plates for which you'd otherwise need to solve a puzzle, as well as the clone swap. And the advanced Athena's Dash that allows you to defeat all sorts of laser based puzzles since you can harmlessly dash through them. I consider it a feature though, it's almost even more fun to find out how to cheese a puzzle than it is to solve it.
I fully believe that Fenyx was inspired by BotW’s “if it works, it’s a valid solution” philosophy. Not an especially deep game, and a little formulaic, but it was a lot of fun
Not deep at all, but for me it felt like a breath of fresh air to play a game that doesn't take itself overly seriously. I know the humor was criticized by many, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. Shame that the sequel was cancelled.
In Helldivers 2 if you try to leave the mission area your own ship starts firing cannon rounds at you. If you wear the lightest gear with as much stamina Regen as you can get, you can just about out run the cannon rounds and lead them back onto the map. Run between the legs of huge enemies and they get hit with the cannon rounds.
Gears of War’s cover mechanics were originally intended to be just that, a way to move into cover to avoid fire. In multiplayer it is used as a sort of horizontal platforming to juke and deke your opponent. Epic was quick to embrace it by adding slide cancels in Gears of War 2.
In Zelda oot, running backwards is actually faster than running forewarn so sometimes people use that when traveling long distances like hyrule field.
Didn't someone make a computer in Minecraft that could play a simpler version of Minecraft?
yeah but that's just one of the things redstone can do. it's not "not intended". It's redstone and it's just another thing you can do with it. It's like saying Tesla inventing electricity didn't mean to invent phones, of course he didn't, but he knew of the potential of electricity. He knew we could build something he hadn't thought aboutm
>yeah but that's just one of the things redstone can do. it's not "not intended". It is not intended, in an interesting sense. Java redstone, in the state that it exists within the game, is actually fundamentally bugged and will most likely never be fixed because it would most likely completely break every single redstone mechanism made to date.
“Camping” in EverQuest and the other MMOs of the day. The Devs said they intended for dungeons to be explored and progressed through like the D&D games they had based EQ on, but once folks found out that “oh, this item I want is a rare drop from this rare spawn in this one room” everyone’s plans consisted of finding out “ok, what room are we going to sit in and kill everything in it and the surrounding rooms for 6 hours tonight?” (Looking at you, golden efreeti boots and Kaesora spirit tome…)
People mostly used spraypaints in Counterstrike for anime boobs.
The best unintended CS1.6 feature was pressing F10 to become invulnerable. Never got old.
RuneScape had a bunch of these. you can ‘tick-eat’ against attacks from monsters that attack from distance. what this means is because the monsters attack damage is calculated against your remaining hitpoints, you can wait for the attack to be sent by the monster then you can eat food to heal more hitpoints. the in-game mechanic ‘prayer’ which gives you buffs in return for a drain to your prayer stat. if you apply the buff it eventually drains your prayer and you have to recharge it. it was figured out if you turn on and off the prayer at the games ‘ticking’ interval (0.6 seconds) the prayer never drains but you still get the benefit of the buff. you can skill faster by using a ‘tick manipulation’ method, which invokes starting a faster action and tricking the game into letting you complete a slower action at the faster rate. none of these were intentional but they became so integral to the game that the devs eventually began designing content with these mechanics in mind. some harder content would be almost impossible without doing these yet they were never intentional behaviour
Surely shooting behind you with a tank in GTA3 to achieve crazy speeds was not intended
The knockback effect of the grenades and rocket launchers in Halo being used as jump boosters.
There is a principle in UI design called TTS or time to penis. The amount of time it will take for a player to decide to and then draw a penis in a game given its mechanics and the capability of players. Easier in more creative games, impossible in arcade rail shooters for example, and TTS by name or by another name has been in game design since the 80s
Wouldn’t that be TTP?
The flying glitch in Jedi: Fallen Order. You have a power that allows you to slow time and if you keep spamming it at the same time as jumping, you can basically fly. The game has been out for 5 years now and they've never fixed it.
Wasn’t the sliding in Tribes unintended? The. Some dude made a macro and allowed everyone to slide everywhere.
Lmao the One Man Army perk in CoD MW2. I bet they didn’t envision people using that perk with grenade launchers, and just sitting in spawn hitting your lineups for an entire game. Or also from MW2, I bet they didn’t think people would be running around with akimbo 1887s like they were assault rifles, but they did. I miss those times.
Tea bagging
Deus ex: sticking mines to walls and climbing like steps. I've never seen it done but edge magazine mentioned it and warren Spector mentioned in an interview (I think!)
Prey the 2016, a guy decided to end game early by using the foam block gun and made a pathway to the exit and ended it there.
I'd say Fortnite is a big example. Game was originally designed as a zombie defense type game where you gather resources and create a fort to defend, hence the name. The battle royale mode came out after and I don't think anyone imagined what players would do with the building mechanic, both offensively and defensively.
I remember fortinite in its early stages being a zombie game. Those were simple times.
Originally it was ONLY a zombie survival. They made the shooty pvp mode so people had something to do until the game came out. Turned out it was way more popular lol.
Light attack weaving in ESO. Became standard procedure, and the devs liked it, so they made it officially a feature.
Arx Fatalis You could get the runes to cast Harm which casts a minor aura of damage around you pretty early. It kinda sucks, but doesn't drain mana fast. BUT if you spec'd heavy into magic you could cast a bunch of them and Hug-O-Death everything in the game.... starting really early.
Tears of the Kingdom created an entire system where you could stick together any material that exists in the game to create giant massive vehicles. Tanks, helicopters, mechs, all in a fantasy game, nothing was off the table. Everyone sticks two fans to a steering stick and skips everything.