The Percentages Are Lying To You
Chance-To-Hit means everything to the player in tactical RPGs, but those chances are totally fudged in hidden ways. In games like Fire Emblem, the random rolls for attack are actually done twice and averaged to avoid wild extremes in the numbers generated — and XCOM: Enemy Unknown takes things to a whole different level with its blatant lies.
As discussed on this extensive GameFaqs Forums post, the percentages for shot accuracy and changed by a multitude of factors to make the game feel more fair. With fewer soldiers, your accuracy is boosted — and aliens chance to hit you is reduced after each consecutive shot they take. Every time you miss, the chances you’ll hit on the next shot are increased. It’s much less random than the game lets on.
AI Rubberbanding
Every modern racing game has rubberbanding in some form. It’s so common and visible, most players recognize what’s going on even if they don’t know the exact term — they can just tell the AI is cheating to catch up to them. It goes both ways; the AI cheats to stay competitive, and falls behind to help you get back into the race. The best racing games with AI know how to properly balance rubberbanding to keep the race engaging. The worst are just straight-up annoying.
Mirrors Are Just Inverted Copies Of The Room
Here’s a trick that’s gone completely by the wayside thanks to raytracing technology. Before we could use graphics cards to literally generate a mirror image of a scene in-game, developers had to use tricks. Build Engine games like Duke Nukem 3D and Blood had an ingenious little trick to make mirrors — they just copied and inverted the room. The mirror is actually just a window.
And It Doesn’t Matter How Well You Do
Sometimes skill just doesn’t matter. The illusion of choice is a powerful tool in a game developer’s arsenal, and sometimes they make you feel like you’ve overcome a hard challenge when there wasn’t any challenge to begin with. One of the most surprising and clear examples of this appears in Bioshock 2 — when you first encounter the Big Sister, no matter what, she’ll always do enough damage to leave you barely alive before being defeated.
Whether you’re a master at the game or a complete noob, the result will be the same. This isn’t true of any of the future fights against Big Sisters — just the introductory one so everyone knows how dangerous these creatures are. Its a clever tutorial moment where you don’t even realize its a tutorial.
There are countless tricks developers use, and we’ve just barely scratched the surface. Let us know what weird methods developers use and we’ll add them to another list in the near future!
