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by alf
5117 days ago
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Are you referring to skiing? Tribes is an interesting example of a "hack" that completely re-invents the game (in most people's opinions, for the better). For those not familiar, a bit of gaming history:
Tribes is a FPS where the players have jetpacks and can fly around in the air. The jetpacks have limited energy, so players ended up having to spend a lot of time on the ground too. One particularly innovative aspects of Tribes was it's expansive maps. It was like a Battlefield game, but 5 years earlier. By only running and jetting, it could take minutes to get across a map, which is important considering the primary objective of the game was to move the opposing team's flag from side of the map to your team's side. The hack was: players discovered that jumping at the instant the player lands on downhill surface caused them to accelerate in the downhill direction. Mashing repeatedly on the jump key going down a large hill would cause the player to accelerate all the way down the hill, as if there was no friction with the ground (hence "skiing"). Someone wrote a script that automated this act so all a player had to do was hold down the jump button instead of pressing it repeatedly. This bug completely re-invented the game into something no one imagined it would be. Many players embraced it, I am sure some did not. It added a layer of complexity and made the game addictively fast paced (with skill you could now get across a map in seconds). The competitive community embraced the new style of play and the developers had no choice but to not patch the bug. This bug arguably became the defining gameplay aspect of Tribes. The lesson? As mentioned here many times, the users are what make your product special. Sometimes they will invent uses for it you never imagined :) |
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