Overpowered game mechanics

[username]

I started playing TRI: Of Friendship and Madness recently. It is a first person puzzle game where initially you draw triangles (click three points in the environment not too far apart to make one, the outline will be yellow if it isn’t to steep/is standable upon) in order to explore a 3d environment and make your way to three main objects I dub “keys” that open the way to the next level, along with several other non-key-collectibles for those who want to poke around some more.

Around the fifth level the game shifts a bit where the triangles you are drawing gain their own gravity, basically allowing you to walk up any wall or on ceilings and such. In doing so it basically breaks open the levels, although I’m early enough still to know that the game is gonna bite back something fierce in the not too distant future.

Still it allows this power to be as strong as initially seems it would be, the only limitations being that you can’t draw them in space and that they can’t be too too large. Often times in games you are given an ability that seems like it’d be almost game breakingly powerful only for the game to quickly pull back on it. I think back to, say, Portal 2 where you are given this amazing portal technology only to end up in areas where it works on fewer and fewer surfaces. I recall many puzzles where there is only one spot on a surface that is usable which both gives away a portion of the solution and kinda kills a bit of the “oh wow, I can do anything” buzz the game gives you early on.

The game TRI reminds me of in this regard is Tiny and Big: Grandpa’s Leftovers. That physics puzzle platformer basically took the cutting concept from those earliest Metal Gear Rising vids and went hog wild with it. Your laser couldn’t cut through every single thing in the game… but it cut through about as much as is possible without tearing the game apart and then perhaps went a step further.

Often times there was I assume an intended solution but you were left free to try and cut things in any way to make it to where you were heading. Much of the game was basically climbing your way up a mountain by literally cutting a path through it, and the game was perfectly fine letting you destroy the only path forward by cutting it to ribbons (that’s what checkpoints are for).

It… wasn’t a great game. I’m not sure TRI will be a great game either. Still, there is something about their approaches, about letting your abilities go too far and just trying to contain it the best that they can, that I dig.

[woudww]

Corrypt, of course!

I really dig that sort of approach too and wish it came up more frequently. One thing that I think always underwhelms me in games is magic, especially when it’s supposed to be a super-natural, super-powerful thing, and i don’t know, i wish more games had magic systems that were able to cause catastrophe like corrypt’s?

Another example that comes to mind is yr dragon powers in BOF5: Dragon Quarter, where you have this super powered dragon mode but only so much you can use it throughout the game before you die. And the game over counter ticks up every few steps anyway, making it a little harder to ration out. I guess this is a little bit more conventionally risk/ reward than what you’re talking about though?

[Tulpa]

else heart.break()

Within minutes of starting the game, you are able to hack a coffee cup to refill itself, eliminate the need for sleep, unlock every door in the game, etc.

Once I do some investigation, I should be able to hack a coffee cup to win the game in a single action (I have to find the computer with the broadcast command, that should be all that I need to beat the game)

[Hojulas]

Would alchemy and such in Morrowind be an opposite example? At first glance, it doesn’t seem like something you can break the game over your knee with.

[haley]

[haley]

@commedes999999

Corrypt, of course!

this is a good place to shoehorn in a post about Game Title: Lost Levels, which brough designed completely around a programming mistake in one of his games’ mechanics.

[sleepysmiles]

Is this supposed to be game mechanics that are powerful but limited, or just straight up OP/broken mechanics?

The latter are my favorite kinds of mechanics in usually my favorite kinds of games, especially if they require a little creativity to sniff out.

-Like alchemy in Morrowind, as Hojulas mentions. Once you realize potion power is based on your INT, turning yourself into a living god becomes a matter of having enough materials and patience. That whole game is about futzing with the mechanics and breaking the world in unique ways – it’s even tacitly encouraged by the in-game mythology!

-The original SaGa/The Final Fantasy Legend requires you to buy STRENGTH and AGILITY potions to strengthen your humans. These potions are fixed at 300 GP throughout the game. From the second world onward most random encounters leave well over 1k gold. Agility affects both your damage with AGI-based weapons and your movement speed. You can increase your stats well over the apparent cap of 99. What all this means is that a team of humans (or hell, a lone human) can brutalize the majority of the game with a measly rapier. You don’t even have to grind.

-The third game in that series brings back the human development in the form of robots, and they’re just as powerful for the same reason. It also introduces the beast class, which is the jack-of-all-trades except with zero drawbacks. Most beasts have access to stone magic, which is a popular OP Final Fantasy spell that is even better than usual here, because almost no enemies resist it and it hardly ever misses. Oh, and you can buy Elixers. For like 3500 GP, in every store. And they cure all ailments including death. SaGa 3 is a really easy game.

-Your Luck stat in Fallout affects obvious things like your critical hit rate and stat rolls, as well as makes you more likely to come across unique events (like the crashed spaceship where you can pick up the most deadly energy weapon in the game). What it also affects is your gambling success rate – if you have the gambling stat over 50% and 8+ Luck, you will win more often than you lose and can easily rack up thousands of caps in about ten minutes. Which you can then use to load down yourself and your companions with literally as many arms and stimpacks as you can carry.

-Stat (de)buffs in Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne are capped at 4 uses, but otherwise only limited by a pair of (de)buff removing spells (which you can also get, and they’re very handy in several boss fights). They’ll last for the entire battle if they aren’t negated. The Suku- family are the most overpowered of all because they raise your agility and evasion, and the entire battle system hinges on successful hits/misses. If you boost yours to the max and debuff your enemies through the floor, they will almost never be able to touch you and will waste all their turns. You can also do fun things like Taunt your enemies twice, which makes them ridiculously powerful but sharply weakens their defense – then use the aforementioned buff-canceling spell, totally removing their advantage.
Then there’s stuff like Bright/Dark Might and transferring skills with mitama and all the little ways you can bust the game wide open if you know how to use fusion properly. Love it.

-The Meat Cleaver in Demon’s Souls. It scales tremendously well from multiple stats, it deals partial magic damage, most of its attacks provide hyperarmor and knock enemies to the ground, and it can be buffed. Yummy.

[schroeder]

Perfect Dark’s Farsight: Self-aiming x-ray sniper rifle that always kills with one hit and can reach arbitrarily far across the level. It’s limited by weird, unwieldy controls, which makes in-game sense for a highly advanced alien weapon.

[sleepysmiles]

That reminds me: V.A.T.S. (in the original Fallout 3 at least)
I like V.A.T.S. but in a guilty pleasure kind of way.

[username]

In jinxing myself news, the most recent level of TRI introduced wooden surfaces you cannot attach triangles to.

@commedes999999

Corrypt, of course!

It struck me a few hours after I posted this that Corrypt was another great example of this, was happy to see it mentioned.

@sleepysmiles

Is this supposed to be game mechanics that are powerful but limited, or just straight up OP/broken mechanics?

The less limits the better I say.

[Godamn_Milkman]

In Zone of the Enders-First of Mars (the GBA game) you could never get hit if you played it right. It was a tactics game, but the combat required them to match a crosshair over your chrosshair. But the computer couldn’t deal with you moving in a circle.

[Broco]

Any single-player game past a certain level of complexity has several of these, which are well-explored in speedrun videos. For example, the Final Fantasy speedruns feature some manner of 1-hit KO trick on most of the bosses for pretty much every game in the series. What’s a bit less common is overpowered tricks that are easy to find in a first casual playthrough.

[yarusenai]

i totally forgot that game existed but that’s the damn truth. don’t think i ever beat it despite that, though.

[frothking]

https://alexnisnevich.github.io/untrusted/ - hot code loading

[wourme]

I mentioned this in another thread, but I’ve been having fun with the latest version of Vampire Survivors. It just pulls out all the stops on how powerful you can get.

The mechanic that allows this is the golden eggs. At first, these were negligible because they give your character a permanent 0.01 or even 0.001 bonus to a random ability and you typically get at most four in a run. But you can now “farm” the eggs. I’ve done this three times, getting about 100 the first time, 1000 the second, and 10,000 the third. After the latter run, I was curious to see what level I could effortlessly reach in less than a minute:

The thing I like most about this is the level of visual abstraction it brings to the game. Sometimes the exaggerated overlapping weapons create a sort of beauty that’s otherwise lacking.

Side note: The reason I picked this game up again is that my little nephew visited a week ago and stayed with me for a couple days. I’d introduced him to this game when he last visited and although he doesn’t have the game at home he’d been researching the secrets online. He was the one who went through the steps required to unlock the egg farming I mentioned above. As he was getting in the car to leave, he repeatedly told me that he expected me to get 1000 eggs in a single run, something he ran out of time for because we were doing things outdoors the last day of his visit. (I brought him and some other family members to a wild animal park and a ziplining course.)