Hidden features in games
Monday, January 4, 2010Today I thought that I wanted to share some stuff I’ve been thinking about lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about unpresented features in games, features or game-mechanics hidden from the player, mechanics that players themselves must find or get a hint from a friend or the game to find. I love these features, they are a mystery and sometimes they make the gameplay great.
My Nr.1 Favorite Hidden Feature:
It’s hard to find a name for this feature but it all started (in my point of view) with the game Outcast. Outcast is a game from the former belgian developer Appeal released in 1999. In 2007 the U.S Government sent a probe into an alien world in a parallel universe, the probe starts transmitting video images back to earth, showing that an alien discovers it and destroys the probe. Upon the destruction of the probe a backlash of energy causes a black hole to open, threatening Earth. Our hero Cutter Slade former U.S NAvy SEAL, is given the job to escort scientists to the alien world and recover the probe and close the black hole. When Cutter arrives the people of the alien world starts to hail Cutter as their messiah (Ulukai)
One of the impressive things on this game is how you handle your enemies, the game is essentially a third-person action adventure game. Even though you have several weapons available to you, you can fight them using indirect methods like cutting off the soldiers food-supply, making the soldiers weak and not strong enough to keep up with you.
This feature is found again much later, as a “kind of” hidden feature in the game Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater for the PS2, where you as Snake can discover enemies food and ammo supply and destroy it. FYI the game doesn’t announce this as a mission, it’s not within your range of objectives but players themselves found out about it. And that’s what I love, they might have gotten a hint from the codec but essentially it wasn’t presented as a feature. Great stuff in my opinion.
It’s brilliant in some ways, if you’re going to stay for a long time within enemy territories, why not destroy their food-supply or ammo? I love this kind of thinking, game-mechanics that feels like intuitive/natural or smart thinking from the players but is already built into the game. It’s not many games that does this and it is truly a wonderful feeling, game-mechanics that hails from physics is great as well, one example is Little Big Planet where the physics engine is so great that players come up with their own techniques jumping over obstacles. Another example is Halo 3 where you actually can get killed by a cone that is flying to fast, or ricocheting sniper-bullets, grenades or the like that changes direction if a force such as an explosion happens to occur within the grenades trajectory. Many developers reveals their secrets too fast, 6 months up to a year before release they might show off their games main features (game-mechanics), when you sit down and play it for yourself you’ll find that there will be no surprises.
All the game-mechanics that feels like hidden game-mechanics are awesome.
