7 Videogame Workarounds That Will Blow Your Mind

Train hats! Alligator boats! A secret dungeon full of every NPC you've ever killed! Take a peek behind the curtain at the ingenious ways in which game developers have managed to trick, hack and jury-rig their games to get the job done. Then subscribe for a list like this every Thursday, why not?

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[kalythai]

Skyrim also has another funky behind the curtain thing. Every time you hear a disembodied voice, there is an actual npc hidden away that provides the voice that you hear in your head. This includes all the disembodied Daedric princes like Azura, Malacath and Meridia. Usually these npcs are just naked characters locked away in a cube somewhere. The strangest is Mephala, who we believe is behind a strange door in the Dragon's Reach palace. If we take a peak outside the geometry, we find that Mephala is an end table just floating behind those locked doors.

[NinaKikuchi]

I love stuff like this. It feels like seeing a really cool car and then finding out it runs by having a bunch of rats running on wheels, it's amusing

[TheValiantBob]

It's not even the first time Bioware has used that exact sprinting trick! Mass Effect 1 did the same thing where sprinting out of combat was just speed lines and a zoomed in camera that didn't actually increase your speed. In fact one of the selling points in the Legacy Collection was that in ME1 sprinting actually made you run faster now! What a novel concept!

[LadyBrightcynder]

I love this kind of thing. People often tell me this kind of trivia ruins the magic for them, but for me, finding out how this stuff is done _is_ the magic.

[reide]

Am game dev, can confirm it's a miracle anything ever gets shipped. "Why is there a strange tomato behind this wall?" "Game crashes on boot without it /shrug"

[Numfuddle]

The way unpacking is using a sort of forced perspective to hide the 3D ness of the scene while using the 3D space for rapid prototyping is really ingenious.

[IAmOnFyre]

An absolute classic example is Wing Commander. Closing the game would break the memory in a very specific way, so they just changed the error message to "Thanks for playing Wing Commander!"

[sebastianwlodarczyk]

Ok, the pretend speed boost in Dragon Age Inquisition got me:D
Speaking of Fallout and its weird solutions, New Vegas has another interesting bodge job- when you complete the game, your character is teleported to a room, where the endgame slideshow is displayed on a wall, view is locked to the first person and a player controls are disabled. So, it's not a cutscene, it's your actual character staring at a wall, with an NPC named "Ron the Narrator" standing behind it:)

[Crazyjay]

I recently found out about Dying Light's mechanic, where instead of having thousands of grabable ledges for the player to grab, they just have one ledge that appears in front of the player when they need it through logic

[anthonynib]

When I found out about the DA:I horse workaround I went back to play again and see if I could tell; turns out even knowing it's fake speed I feel 10x happier going "fast"...
Brains are ridiculous and speedlines are amazing

[typacsk]

If anyone's curious, the ascending stair music from Mario 64 is called a Shepard scale. Christopher Nolan uses it a lot in his movies ("The Prestige, " "The Dark Knight, " and "Dunkirk").

[bradydavidson]

Fun thing about the Mario 64 infinite staircase. The DS port uses the exact same trick, but since the game has a minimap on the lower screen, you can see your character being teleported, thus ruining the illusion.

[josephattwell]

Fun fact: the original Xcom was secretly two games. The world map section where you shoot down UFO was one executable while the ground force tactical sections was another, with these two programs quietly swapping data and exiting/launching into the other to save on limited computer resources. Another one was Castle of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse, which would send the player to a “secret level selection” if the game would ever enter into a crash state. They did this to ensure if the game would ever crash during SEGAs certification process (where the game is tested to ensure it does not have bugs)it would appear that whatever caused the crash was actually a deliberate secret.

[whatwilliwatch]

I took a creative writing class once, and one of the things the instructor said that has stuck with me, is that limitations breed creativity. That seems counterintuitive because limitations seem... well, limiting. His point was that limitations both streamline your efforts (since you can only work within certain parameters, you don't waste time and energy on something outside those parameters), and force you to look at what you DO have available from different perspectives. I feel like this list is a great example of the latter.

[haravikk]

One trick I like from Oblivion is that after you become the Champion of Cyrodil, a statue of you appears in Bruma after a few days; the "statue" is just a copy of your player character and all their worn equipment at a specific point in the game (when you return after collapsing the big oblivion gate there), so if you happened to do that part of the quest in your underpants wielding a spoon… 😂
They just slap a stone shader on it and disable animation and damage. But with a few console commands you can make it an ordinary NPC again.

[frodobaggins]

In Half-Life 1, the guns are all weirdly shaped to be enormous at the barrel end and smaller at the trigger end, but the camera perspective makes you think that they're just regularly sized

[Kinvarus]

I love the idea of your character from Fallout 3 running around the Wasteland with no idea and everybody around them going "They think they're on a train, don't tell them." I would assume that also means either the player, the train hat or the obscuro-vision wrist appliance simulates a train noise as well.

[SolaScientia]

This is why I end up down the rabbit hole of Zullie's FromSoftware vids, lol. The amount of things in FromSoftware games that are NPCs when you'd expect them to be objects or objects when you expect them to be NPCs is amazing. I love the kinds of things devs do to get something to work how they want it to in a game.

[joebeezy]

The thumbnail. I don’t care how many times I hear the train hat explained it still amazes me every time.

[limbobilbo]

If you want a other fallout one, in new vegas when you “sleep” with benny it literally just puts a black box over your head, he walks towards you and speaks then teleports above his bed and dies