10 Genius Ways Video Game Developers Outsmarted You
These God-tier tricks left players none the wiser.
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00:00 One of the many great things about video games is the freedom they grant players to explore
00:04 and make the adventure their own.
00:06 But there's the flip side - that some games are designed so meticulously that they're
00:10 actually playing the player themselves in ways they can't even begin to comprehend.
00:14 These ten video games all saw developers pulling off mind-boggling feats of trickery and deception,
00:20 often to ensure the smoothest and most entertaining experience possible, or perhaps just to cover
00:25 their own ass.
00:26 I'm Jess from WhatCulture and here are 10 genius ways video game developers outsmarted
00:31 you.
00:32 10.
00:33 Games secretly restart your Xbox during loading screens - The Elder Scrolls III Morrowind
00:38 Morrowind may be fondly recalled as one of the greatest RPGs of its era, but those who
00:43 played it on the original Xbox are just as likely to remember the game for its famously
00:47 lengthy loading times.
00:49 But the loading screens were actually a devious smokescreen by Bethesda, who used the opportunity
00:54 to literally reboot your Xbox console without you even knowing, in order to clear its memory
00:59 cache, as the game's director Todd Howard confessed in a recent interview.
01:03 He said, "There's been great tricks that Xbox taught us.
01:06 My favorite one in Morrowind is, if you're running low on memory, you can reboot the
01:10 original Xbox and the user can't tell.
01:12 You can throw like a screen up.
01:14 When Morrowind loads sometimes you get a very long load.
01:17 That's us rebooting the Xbox.
01:19 That was like a Hail Mary."
01:20 Given that this trick went completely undetected for almost an entire 20 years and is surely
01:26 preferable to players having to literally reboot the console themselves and load the
01:30 game all the way back up, it clearly paid off dividends.
01:33 9.
01:34 Secret Level Select Menu Triggered by a Bug - Sonic 3D Blast
01:38 In the case of Sonic 3D Blast, developers Traveller's Tales pulled a fast one over not
01:42 only the players, but also Sega themselves.
01:45 Though you can enter a cheat code to access the game's secret level select menu, you
01:49 may also encounter it during gameplay in a seemingly random fashion.
01:54 This is because the lead programmer of the Mega Drive version of the game, John Burton,
01:58 coded it to throw up the level select menu whenever players encountered a game-breaking
02:02 bug.
02:03 This allowed players to resume from any level they wished while also disguising the fact
02:08 that the game just effectively crashed from both players and, perhaps more importantly,
02:12 Sega's certification team.
02:14 In more recent years, players also noticed that they could trigger the level select menu
02:17 by wiggling the game cartridge around, which is actually due to the connection between
02:22 the cartridge and the console being broken, which the Mega Drive would of course register
02:26 as a bug and immediately transport players to the level select screen.
02:31 In a word, genius.
02:32 8.
02:33 First-Time Players Get a Damage Buff Online to Encourage Play - Gears of War
02:38 Tricking players within the carefully controlled environment of a single-player game is one
02:42 thing, but multiplayer is an entirely different beast.
02:45 At Epic Games implemented a subtle yet brilliant psychological trick to keep players glued
02:50 to their Xbox while playing Gears of War multiplayer.
02:53 Though the game is known for being relatively punishing for new players, the devs opted
02:57 to remedy this by giving first-timers a damage buff and other sly advantages for their first
03:03 few kills in their first game.
03:05 The series' lead designer, Lee Perry, said, "In Gears, found out 90% of first-time players
03:11 don't play a second multiplayer match if they don't get a kill.
03:14 That first game's important, so we started you off with some major advantages, like additional
03:19 damage bonuses that tapered off with your first few kills."
03:22 So if that first game of Gears made you feel empowered and badass, it wasn't so much a
03:27 result of skill or even luck as it was a carefully designed illusion to draw you in and stop
03:32 you from rage-quitting in record time.
03:35 7.
03:36 It Invented Dynamic Resolution to Create True HD Visuals - Wipeout HD
03:41 Though it's been a staple of PC gaming since its inception, dynamic resolutions have only
03:46 recently been introduced into the console sphere - or so we all thought.
03:50 However, the technique, whereby a game alters its resolution on the fly to produce a continually
03:55 smooth frame rate without the player noticing anything, goes all the way back to 2008's
04:00 Wipeout HD.
04:02 The hit racer made the lofty promise that it would output at true 1080p, a rarity given
04:07 that most PS3 games were either 720p or 1080i.
04:11 And though Wipeout HD was widely praised for its jaw-dropping visual fidelity, developer
04:16 studio Liverpool actually tricked players and critics alike by employing dynamic resolution
04:21 scaling in order to maintain a buttery smooth 60fps, even when the action was especially
04:27 frantic.
04:28 Considering how convincing a trick it was, it's much easier to respect the studio for
04:32 their deception rather than begrudge them for it.
04:35 6.
04:36 Endless Stairs Are Caused By Teleporting The Player - Super Mario 64
04:40 Any Super Mario 64 fan worth their salt will remember the infamous endless stairs in Princess
04:46 Peach's Castle, where players without 70 Power Stars will find themselves endlessly
04:50 running up a seemingly infinite flight of stairs without actually getting anywhere.
04:55 But rather than design an actual never-ending staircase, Nintendo's dev team came up with
05:00 an altogether more ingenious solution - by simply building the one staircase and coding
05:05 the stairs to trap the player in a teleport loop between a few steps.
05:09 The loop is seamless enough as to be totally imperceptible to players, such that for 25
05:14 years many have tried to discover sneaky ways to reach the top, such as using the famed
05:19 backwards long jump glitch to basically brute force their way past the loop.
05:23 5.
05:24 Small Tables Are Actually Buried Shelves - The Elder Scrolls V Skyrim
05:29 Bethesda strikes again with another totally radical feat of deception in the Elder Scrolls
05:34 series.
05:35 Maybe a considerably more innocuous one than literally restarting your console.
05:39 In Skyrim, any of the small tables you come across in the game world are actually shelves
05:44 which have been half-buried in the geometry of the map.
05:47 Because in the time-consuming world of AAA game dev, any minute you can save is absolutely
05:51 worth it.
05:52 Though there's been some debate about the efficiency of burying objects underground,
05:56 given that it still exists within the game world and will therefore present a cost to
06:01 the system memory, it's certainly a creative way to recycle existing assets.
06:05 For 99.999% of players, this went unnoticed, even after hundreds or even thousands of hours
06:12 of play.
06:13 And yet, it's so deliciously elegantly simple as the best tricks so often are.
06:18 4.
06:19 The Entire World Is Slanted To Create The Top-Down View - The Legend Of Zelda A Link
06:24 Between Worlds
06:25 A Link Between Worlds is 2013's spiritual successor to 1999's SNES classic, The Legend
06:31 Of Zelda A Link To The Past.
06:33 And in remaining consistent with its aesthetic, it's similarly presented from a top-down
06:37 perspective, albeit in 3D.
06:39 But because a purely top-down viewpoint in 3D wouldn't allow players to glean any of
06:44 the finer details of the characters or environments, Nintendo were forced to actually make the
06:49 entire game world slanted.
06:51 Every item and character in the game was tilted backwards by 45 degrees, as players can momentarily
06:57 observe for themselves by rotating the camera to the side when transforming into Link's
07:01 2D painting form.
07:03 It's something almost all of us take totally for granted.
07:06 And yet without such a tectonic geometric shift, A Link Between Worlds and games like
07:10 it would look completely flat and featureless from above.
07:14 3.
07:15 Sound Effects Are Tied To NPCs - Half-Life
07:18 Sound design in video games is a whole other mess, as is perhaps evidenced no better than
07:23 by Valve's groundbreaking FPS Half-Life, where the team had to get more than a little
07:28 creative to make everything work.
07:30 Only players who pay the utmost attention will notice that NPCs such as Barney move
07:35 their mouths whenever they press buttons on doors and other objects, and this is because
07:39 the resulting sound effects are actually tied to them.
07:42 Due to unspecified technical issues, Valve were forced to attach these contextual sounds
07:47 to the character activating the object rather than the object itself, resulting in the game's
07:52 automated lip-sync script also playing out and their mouth moving along with the sound
07:56 effect.
07:57 It's easily missed if you don't happen to be looking intently at the NPCs as they're
08:01 doing mundane things, and so it's yet another feat of masterful corner-cutting game dev
08:06 from the fine folks at Valve.
08:08 2.
08:09 You Will Trip Over If The World Hasn't Loaded Yet - Jak & Daxter The Precursor Legacy
08:14 It's become increasingly common over the years for games with sprawling open worlds
08:18 to only render portions of the environment within the player's sightline, as was demonstrated
08:23 so impressively in Horizon Zero Dawn.
08:26 But back in 2001, years before Horizon was even a twinkle in Guerrilla Games' eye,
08:31 the first entry into the hit platformer franchise Jak & Daxter employed a frankly awards-worthy
08:36 means of buying itself more time to load in assets.
08:39 Basically, if the game was struggling to keep up and build the game world around you, it
08:44 would force Jak & Daxter to trip over, wrestling control away from the player for around two
08:49 seconds while it finished loading.
08:51 Though most players will only come across this occasionally, speedrunners can find themselves
08:56 becoming frequently unstuck by it, given that it's effectively a safeguard to stop players
09:00 from running ahead of the game itself.
09:03 As far as creative solutions to nagging technical issues go, though, this is masterful, and
09:07 why would we expect anything less from Naughty Dog?
09:10 1.
09:11 Rested XP Encourages Players to Play for Short Bursts - World of Warcraft
09:16 World of Warcraft's Rested XP system grants players an XP boost while they're offline,
09:22 effectively incentivizing players to play for shorter bursts and log back in later,
09:26 where they'll receive 200% of their otherwise unrested XP.
09:31 But Rested XP actually came about in the first place because Blizzard's prototypical scaled
09:36 XP system was largely rejected by playtesters.
09:39 Originally, the game was designed to gradually lower the amount of experience players received
09:44 from 200% to 100% over a play session, to encourage playing for shorter periods of time.
09:50 Play long enough and your XP would bottom out, incentivizing players to log out before
09:54 then and return later.
09:56 But players loathed it, and so designer Rob Pardo came up with the idea of making everything
10:01 in the game effectively take twice as much XP to achieve, while Rested XP would grant
10:06 200% XP gains until it ran out and return the player to 100%.
10:12 The idea is fundamentally the same as before, that you're encouraged to exploit the bigger
10:16 XP gains and log out when they're gone, but now framed through the logical lens of
10:20 Rested XP, it seemed infinitely more acceptable to players.
10:24 Now that's some incredible meddling with human psychology right there.
10:27 That's the end of our list, but do let me know down in the comments if you can think
10:31 of any other genius ways video game developers outsmarted players.
10:36 As always, I've been Jess from WhatCulture, thank you so much for hanging out with me.
10:40 If you like you can come say hi to me on my Twitter account where I'm @JessMcDonald,
10:44 but make sure you stay tuned to us here for plenty more gaming goodness.