- 23 hours ago
These God-tier tricks left players none the wiser.
Category
đ„
Short filmTranscript
00:00One of the many great things about video games is the freedom they grant players to explore
00:04and make the adventure their own.
00:06But there's the flip side, that some games are designed so meticulously that they're
00:10actually playing the player themselves in ways they can't even begin to comprehend.
00:14These 10 video games all saw developers pulling off mind-boggling feats of trickery and deception,
00:20often to ensure the smoothest and most entertaining experience possible, or perhaps just to cover
00:25their own arse.
00:26I'm Jess from WhatCulture and here are 10 Genius Ways Video Game Developers Outsmarted You.
00:3110.
00:32Games Secretly Restarts Your Xbox During Loading Screens
00:36The Elder Scrolls III Morrowind
00:38Morrowind may be fondly recalled as one of the greatest RPGs of its era, but those who played
00:43it on the original Xbox are just as likely to remember the game for its famously lengthy
00:47loading times.
00:48But the loading screens were actually a devious smokescreen by Bethesda, who used the opportunity
00:54to literally reboot your Xbox console without you even knowing, in order to clear its memory
00:59cache, as the games director Todd Howard confessed in a recent interview.
01:03He said,
01:04There are some great tricks that Xbox taught us.
01:06My favourite one in Morrowind is, if you're running low on memory, you can reboot the
01:10original Xbox and the user can't tell.
01:12You can throw like a screen up.
01:14When Morrowind loads sometimes you get a very long load.
01:17That's us rebooting the Xbox.
01:19That was like a Hail Mary.
01:20Given that this trick went completely undetected for almost an entire 20 years and is surely
01:26preferable to players having to literally reboot the console themselves and load the game
01:30all the way back up, it clearly paid off dividends.
01:33Number 9.
01:34Secret Level Select Menu Triggered by a Bug.
01:37Sonic 3D Blast.
01:38In the case of Sonic 3D Blast, developers Traveler's Tails pulled a fast one over not only the players,
01:44but also Sega themselves.
01:45Though you can enter a cheat code to access the game's Secret Level Select Menu, you may
01:49also encounter it during gameplay in a seemingly random fashion.
01:54This is because the lead programmer of the Mega Drive version of the game, John Burton, coded
01:58it to throw up the Level Select Menu whenever players encountered a game-breaking bug.
02:03This allowed players to resume from any level they wished while also disguising the fact
02:08that the game just effectively crashed from both players and, perhaps more importantly,
02:12Sega's certification team.
02:14In more recent years, players also noticed that they could trigger the Level Select Menu
02:17by wiggling the game cartridge around, which is actually due to the connection between
02:22the cartridge and the console being broken, which the Mega Drive would of course register
02:26as a bug, and immediately transport players to the Level Select screen.
02:31In a word, genius.
02:32Number 8.
02:33First-time players get a damage buff online to encourage play.
02:37Gears of War.
02:38Tricking players within the carefully controlled environment of a single-player game is one
02:42thing, but multiplayer is an entirely different beast.
02:45But Epic Games implemented a subtle yet brilliant psychological trick to keep players glued to their
02:50Xbox while playing Gears of War multiplayer.
02:53Though the game is known for being relatively punishing for new players, the devs opted to
02:58remedy this by giving first-timers a damage buff and other sly advantages for their first
03:03few kills in their first game.
03:05The series lead designer Lee Perry said,
03:07In Gears, found out 90% of first-time players don't play a second multiplayer match if they
03:13don't get a kill.
03:14That first game's important, so we started you off with some major advantages, like additional
03:19damage bonuses that tapered off with your first few kills.
03:22So if that first game of Gears made you feel empowered and badass, it wasn't so much a
03:27result of skill or even luck, as it was a carefully designed illusion to draw you in and stop you
03:32from rage-quitting in record time.
03:34Number 7.
03:35It invented dynamic resolution to create true HD visuals.
03:40Wipeout HD.
03:41Though it's been a staple of PC gaming since its inception, dynamic resolutions have only recently
03:46been introduced into the console sphere, or so we all thought.
03:51However, the technique, whereby a game alters its resolution on the fly to produce a continually
03:55smooth framerate without the player noticing anything, goes all the way back to 2008's Wipeout HD.
04:02The hit racer made the lofty promise that it would output at true 1080p, a rarity given
04:07that most PS3 games were either 720p or 1080i.
04:11And though Wipeout HD was widely praised for its jaw-dropping visual fidelity, developer
04:16studio Liverpool actually tricked players and critics alike by employing dynamic resolution
04:21scaling in order to maintain a buttery smooth 60fps, even when the action was especially frantic.
04:28Considering how convincing a trick it was, it's much easier to respect the studio for their
04:32deception rather than begrudge them for it.
04:34Number 6.
04:35The endless stares are caused by teleporting the player.
04:39Super Mario 64.
04:40Any Super Mario 64 fan worth their salt will remember the infamous endless stares in Princess
04:46Peach's Castle, where players without 70 power stars will find themselves endlessly running
04:51up a seemingly infinite flight of stairs without actually getting anywhere.
04:55But rather than design an actual never-ending staircase, Nintendo's dev team came up with an
05:00altogether more ingenious solution, by simply building the one staircase and coding the stairs
05:05to trap the player in a teleport loop between a few steps.
05:09The loop is seamless enough as to be totally imperceptible to players, such that for 25 years
05:14many have tried to discover sneaky ways to reach the top, such as using the famed backwards
05:19long jump glitch to basically brute force their way past the loop.
05:23Number 5.
05:24Small tables are actually buried shelves.
05:27The Elder Scrolls V Skyrim.
05:28Bethesda strikes again with another totally radical feat of deception in the Elder Scrolls series,
05:34albeit a considerably more innocuous one than literally restarting your console.
05:39In Skyrim, any of the small tables you come across in the game world are actually shelves
05:44which have been half-buried in the geometry of the map, because in the time-consuming world
05:48of AAA game dev, any minute you can save is absolutely worth it.
05:52Though there's been some debate about the efficiency of burying objects underground, given
05:56that it still exists within the game world and will therefore present a cost to the system
06:01memory, it's certainly a creative way to recycle existing assets.
06:06For 99.999% of players, this went unnoticed, even after hundreds or even thousands of hours
06:12of play, and yet it's so deliciously elegantly simple as the best tricks so often are.
06:18Number 4.
06:19The entire world is slanted to create the top-down view.
06:22The Legend of Zelda A Link Between Worlds.
06:24A Link Between Worlds is 2013's spiritual successor to 1999's SNES classic The Legend
06:31of Zelda A Link to the Past, and in remaining consistent with its aesthetic, it's similarly
06:35presented from a top-down perspective, albeit in 3D.
06:39But because a purely top-down viewpoint in 3D wouldn't allow players to glean any of the
06:44finer details of the characters or environments, Nintendo were forced to actually make the entire
06:49game world slanted.
06:51Every item and character in the game was tilted backwards by 45 degrees, as players can momentarily
06:57observe for themselves by rotating the camera to the side when transforming into Link's
07:012D painting form.
07:02It's something almost all of us take totally for granted.
07:06And yet without such a tectonic geometric shift, a link between worlds and games like
07:10it would look completely flat and featureless from above.
07:14Number 3.
07:15Sound effects are tied to NPCs.
07:17Half-Life.
07:18Sound design in video games is a whole other mess, as is perhaps evidenced no better than
07:23by Valve's groundbreaking FPS Half-Life, where the team had to get more than a little creative
07:28to make everything work.
07:30Only players who pay the utmost attention will notice that NPCs such as Barney move their mouths
07:35whenever they press buttons on doors and other objects, and this is because the resulting
07:40sound effects are actually tied to them.
07:42Due to unspecified technical issues, Valve were forced to attach these contextual sounds
07:47to the character activating the object rather than the object itself, resulting in the game's
07:52automated lip sync script also playing out and their mouth moving along with the sound
07:56effect.
07:57It's easily missed if you don't happen to be looking intently at the NPCs as they're doing
08:01mundane things, and so it's yet another feat of masterful corner-cutting game dev from
08:06the fine folks at Valve.
08:08Number 2.
08:09You will trip over if the world hasn't loaded yet.
08:12Jak and Daxter the Precursor Legacy.
08:14It's become increasingly common over the years for games with sprawling open worlds to only
08:19render portions of the environment within the player's sightline, as was demonstrated
08:23so impressively in Horizon Zero Dawn.
08:25However back in 2001, years before Horizon was even a twinkle in Guerrilla Games' eye,
08:31the first entry into the hit platformer franchise Jak and Daxter employed a frankly awards-worthy
08:36means of buying itself more time to load in assets.
08:40Basically, if the game was struggling to keep up and build the game world around you, it would
08:44force Jak and Daxter to trip over, wrestling control away from the player for around two
08:49seconds while it finished loading.
08:51Although most players will only come across this occasionally, speedrunners can find themselves
08:56becoming frequently unstuck by it, given that it's effectively a safeguard to stop
09:00players from running ahead of the game itself.
09:03As far as creative solutions to nagging technical issues go though, this is masterful, and why
09:07would we expect anything less from Naughty Dog?
09:10Number 1.
09:11Rested XP encourages players to play for short bursts.
09:15World of Warcraft.
09:16World of Warcraft's Rested XP system grants players an XP boost while they're offline.
09:21effectively incentivizing players to play for shorter bursts and log back in later, where
09:26they'll receive 200% of their otherwise unrested XP.
09:31But Rested XP actually came about in the first place because Blizzard's prototypical scaled
09:36XP system was largely rejected by playtesters.
09:39Originally, the game was designed to gradually lower the amount of experience players received
09:44from 200% to 100% over a play session, to encourage playing for shorter periods of time.
09:50Play long enough and your XP would bottom out, incentivizing players to log out before then
09:54and return later.
09:55But players loathed it, and so designer Rob Pardo came up with the idea of making everything
10:01in the game effectively take twice as much XP to achieve, while Rested XP would grant 200%
10:07XP gains until it ran out and return the player to 100%.
10:12The idea is fundamentally the same as before â that you're encouraged to exploit the
10:15bigger XP gains and log out when they're gone.
10:18But now framed through the logical lens of Rested XP, it seemed infinitely more acceptable
10:23to players.
10:24Now that's some incredible meddling with human psychology right there.
10:27That's the end of our list, but do let me know down in that comment section if you
10:31can think of any other genius ways video game developers outsmarted players.
10:36As always, I've been Jess from WhatCulture, thank you so much for hanging out with me.
10:40If you like you can come say hi to me on my twitter account where I'm at Jess McDonnell,
10:44but make sure you stay tuned to us here for plenty more gaming goodness.
10:48Thank you!
Be the first to comment