These God-tier tricks left players none the wiser.
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00:00One of the many great things about video games is the freedom they grant players to explore
00:04and make the adventure their own.
00:06But there's the flip side, that some games are designed so meticulously that they're
00:10actually playing the player themselves in ways they can't even begin to comprehend.
00:14These ten video games all saw developers pulling off mind-boggling feats of trickery and deception,
00:20often to ensure the smoothest and most entertaining experience possible, or perhaps just to cover
00:25their own arse.
00:26I'm Jess from WhatCulture and here are 10 Genius Ways Video Game Developers Outsmarted
00:31You.
00:3210.
00:33Games secretly restart your Xbox during loading screens.
00:36The Elder Scrolls III Morrowind
00:38Morrowind may be fondly recalled as one of the greatest RPGs of its era, but those who
00:43played it on the original Xbox are just as likely to remember the game for its famously
00:47lengthy loading times.
00:48But the loading screens were actually a devious smokescreen by Bethesda, who used the opportunity
00:54to literally reboot your Xbox console without you even knowing, in order to clear its memory
00:59cache, as the game's director Todd Howard confessed in a recent interview.
01:03He said,
01:04"'There's been great tricks that Xbox taught us.
01:06My favorite one in Morrowind is, if you're running low on memory, you can reboot the
01:10original Xbox and the user can't tell.
01:12You can throw, like, a screen up.
01:14When Morrowind loads sometimes you get a very long load.
01:17That's us rebooting the Xbox.
01:19That was like a Hail Mary.'"
01:20Given that this trick went completely undetected for almost an entire 20 years and is surely
01:26preferable to players having to literally reboot the console themselves and load the
01:30game all the way back up, it clearly paid off dividends.
01:339.
01:34Secret Level Select Menu Triggered by a Bug
01:36Sonic 3D Blast
01:38In the case of Sonic 3D Blast, developers Traveller's Tales pulled a fast one over
01:42not only the players, but also Sega themselves.
01:45Though you can enter a cheat code to access the game's secret level select menu, you
01:49may also encounter it during gameplay, in a seemingly random fashion.
01:54This is because the lead programmer of the Mega Drive version of the game, John Burton,
01:58coded it to throw up the level select menu whenever players encountered a game-breaking
02:02bug.
02:03This allowed players to resume from any level they wished, while also disguising the fact
02:08that the game just effectively crashed from both players and, perhaps more importantly,
02:12Sega's certification team.
02:14In more recent years, players also noticed that they could trigger the level select menu
02:18by wiggling the game cartridge around, which is actually due to the connection between
02:22the cartridge and the console being broken, which the Mega Drive would of course register
02:26as a bug, and immediately transport players to the level select screen.
02:31In a word, genius.
02:328.
02:33First-Time Players Get a Damage Buff Online to Encourage Play
02:37Gears of War
02:38Tricking players within the carefully controlled environment of a single-player game is one
02:42thing, but multiplayer is an entirely different beast.
02:45At Epic Games implemented a subtle yet brilliant psychological trick to keep players glued
02:50to their Xbox while playing Gears of War multiplayer.
02:53Though the game is known for being relatively punishing for new players, the devs opted
02:58to remedy this by giving first-timers a damage buff and other sly advantages for their first
03:03few kills in their first game.
03:05The series' lead designer, Lee Perry, said,
03:08In Gears, found out 90% of first-time players don't play a second multiplayer match if they
03:13don't get a kill.
03:14That first game's important, so we started you off with some major advantages, like additional
03:19damage bonuses that tapered off with your first few kills.
03:22So if that first game of Gears made you feel empowered and badass, it wasn't so much a
03:27result of skill or even luck as it was a carefully designed illusion to draw you in and stop
03:32you from rage-quitting in record time.
03:357.
03:36It Invented Dynamic Resolution to Create True HD Visuals
03:40Wipe out HD
03:41Though it's been a staple of PC gaming since its inception, dynamic resolutions have only
03:46recently been introduced into the console sphere, or so we all thought.
03:50However, the technique, whereby a game alters its resolution on the fly to produce a continually
03:55smooth frame rate without the player noticing anything, goes all the way back to 2008's
04:00Wipe Out HD.
04:02The hit racer made the lofty promise that it would output at true 1080p, a rarity given
04:07that most PS3 games were either 720p or 1080i.
04:11And though Wipe Out HD was widely praised for its jaw-dropping visual fidelity, developer
04:16studio Liverpool actually tricked players and critics alike by employing dynamic resolution
04:21scaling in order to maintain a buttery smooth 60fps, even when the action was especially
04:27frantic.
04:28Considering how convincing a trick it was, it's much easier to respect the studio for
04:32their deception rather than begrudge them for it.
04:356.
04:36Endless Stairs Are Caused By Teleporting The Player
04:38Super Mario 64
04:40Any Super Mario 64 fan worth their salt will remember the infamous endless stairs in Princess
04:46Peach's Castle, where players without 70 Power Stars will find themselves endlessly
04:50running up a seemingly infinite flight of stairs without actually getting anywhere.
04:55But rather than design an actual never-ending staircase, Nintendo's dev team came up with
05:00an altogether more ingenious solution.
05:02Play simply building the one staircase and coding the stairs to trap the player in a
05:07teleport loop between a few steps.
05:09The loop is seamless enough as to be totally imperceptible to players, such that for 25
05:14years many have tried to discover sneaky ways to reach the top, such as using the famed
05:19backwards long jump glitch to basically brute force their way past the loop.
05:235.
05:24Small Tables Are Actually Buried Shelves
05:27The Elder Scrolls V Skyrim
05:29Bethesda strikes again with another totally radical feat of deception in the Elder Scrolls
05:34series, albeit a considerably more innocuous one than literally restarting your console.
05:39In Skyrim, any of the small tables you come across in the game world are actually shelves
05:44which have been half-buried in the geometry of the map, because in the time-consuming
05:48world of AAA game dev, any minute you can save is absolutely worth it.
05:52Though there's been some debate about the efficiency of burying objects underground
05:56and given that it still exists within the game world and will therefore present a cost
06:00to the system memory, it's certainly a creative way to recycle existing assets.
06:05For 99.999% of players, this went unnoticed, even after hundreds or even thousands of hours
06:12of play, and yet it's so deliciously elegantly simple as the best tricks so often are.
06:184.
06:19The Entire World Is Slanted To Create The Top-Down View
06:22The Legend Of Zelda A Link Between Worlds
06:25A Link Between Worlds is 2013's spiritual successor to 1999's SNES classic The Legend
06:31Of Zelda A Link To The Past, and in remaining consistent with its aesthetic, it's similarly
06:36presented from a top-down perspective, albeit in 3D.
06:39But because a purely top-down viewpoint in 3D wouldn't allow players to glean any of
06:44the finer details of the characters or environments, Nintendo were forced to actually make the
06:49entire game world slanted.
06:51Every item and character in the game was tilted backwards by 45 degrees, as players
06:56can momentarily observe for themselves by rotating the camera to the side when transforming
07:01into Link's 2D painting form.
07:03It's something almost all of us take totally for granted, and yet without such a tectonic
07:07geometric shift, A Link Between Worlds and games like it would look completely flat and
07:12featureless from above.
07:143.
07:15Sound Effects Are Tied To NPCs
07:17Half-Life
07:19Sound design in video games is a whole other mess, as is perhaps evidenced no better than
07:23by Valve's groundbreaking FPS Half-Life, where the team had to get more than a little
07:28creative to make everything work.
07:30Only players who pay the utmost attention will notice that NPCs such as Barney move
07:35their mouths whenever they press buttons on doors and other objects, and this is because
07:39the resulting sound effects are actually tied to them.
07:42Due to unspecified technical issues, Valve were forced to attach these contextual sounds
07:47to the character activating the object rather than the object itself, resulting in the game's
07:52automated lip-sync script also playing out and their mouth moving along with the sound
07:56effect.
07:57It's easily missed if you don't happen to be looking intently at the NPCs as they're
08:01doing mundane things, and so it's yet another feat of masterful corner-cutting game dev
08:06from the fine folks at Valve.
08:082.
08:09You Will Trip Over If The World Hasn't Loaded Yet
08:12Jak and Daxter The Precursor Legacy
08:14It's become increasingly common over the years for games with sprawling open worlds
08:18to only render portions of the environment within the player's sightline, as was demonstrated
08:23so impressively in Horizon Zero Dawn.
08:26But back in 2001, years before Horizon was even a twinkle in Guerrilla Games' eye,
08:31the first entry into the hit platformer franchise Jak and Daxter employed a frankly awards-worthy
08:36means of buying itself more time to load in assets.
08:39Basically, if the game was struggling to keep up and build the game world around you, it
08:44would force Jak and Daxter to trip over, wrestling control away from the player for
08:48around two seconds while it finished loading.
08:51Though most players will only come across this occasionally, speedrunners can find themselves
08:56becoming frequently unstuck by it, given that it's effectively a safeguard to stop players
09:00from running ahead of the game itself.
09:03As far as creative solutions to nagging technical issues go, though, this is masterful, and
09:07why would we expect anything less from Naughty Dog?
09:101.
09:11Rested XP Encourages Players to Play for Short Bursts – World of Warcraft
09:16World of Warcraft's Rested XP system grants players an XP boost while they're offline,
09:22effectively incentivizing players to play for shorter bursts and log back in later,
09:26where they'll receive 200% of their otherwise unrested XP.
09:31But Rested XP actually came about in the first place because Blizzard's prototypical scaled
09:36XP system was largely rejected by playtesters.
09:39Originally, the game was designed to gradually lower the amount of experience players received
09:44from 200% to 100% over a play session, to encourage playing for shorter periods of time.
09:50Play long enough and your XP would bottom out, incentivizing players to log out before
09:54then and return later.
09:56But players loathed it, and so designer Rob Pardo came up with the idea of making everything
10:01in the game effectively take twice as much XP to achieve, while Rested XP would grant
10:06200% XP gains until it ran out, and return the player to 100%.
10:12The idea is fundamentally the same as before, that you're encouraged to exploit the bigger
10:16XP gains and log out when they're gone, but now framed through the logical lens of
10:20Rested XP, it seemed infinitely more acceptable to players.
10:24Now that's some incredible meddling with human psychology right there.
10:27That's the end of our list, but do let me know down in the comments if you can think
10:31of any other genius ways video game developers outsmarted players.
10:36As always, I've been Jess from WhatCulture, thank you so much for hanging out with me.
10:40If you like you can come say hi to me on my Twitter account where I'm at JessMcDonald,
10:44but make sure you stay tuned to us here for plenty more gaming goodness.
10:48Thank you!