Also known as the Waist-High Fence.
Out-of-bounds glitches are routinely exploited by speedrunners to finish games in incredibly fast times. For example, here’s Oblivion in under four minutes, and Fallout 3 in 15½ minutes.
In one of the Legend of Zelda games there’s a field right outside one of the towns that looks like you should be able to get to it, but you can’t. The way the scenery is designed in Final Fantasy 13 you feel like there should be some way to get to the top of the plateaus, but you can’t.
In some games, there is no location that isn’t part of some play area or another, so if you go beyond the bounds, then you end up in some other, often completely unrelated, area of the game.
And an honorable mention should go to Portal. The game consists of 19 “test chambers”, which are basically rooms of puzzles-for-the-sake-of-puzzles. The last one ends with you riding an inescapable moving platform into a flaming furnace. Except that the platform isn’t actually inescapable: You can escape into what appears to be one of those background areas that you can never get into in a video game. You then play the remaining three quarters of the game in the zones “in between” the “real” zones, but which are actually themselves carefully-designed game levels in their own right. All the while, meanwhile, the game designers very carefully prevented any genuine sequence breaks (there are a few minor ones, but they’re in the “shave off a few seconds from your time” category), while maintaining the illusion that you already did one big sequence break, and could find more if you tried hard enough.
…(zombie thread of course, in case everyone hadn’t noticed.)
There are two games: both of them by the same creator (Davey Wreden) that pull back the veil on video games and really make you think. One is the Stanley Parable and the other is The Beginners Guide. Both are very different games: one will have you laughing out loud and the other…well, best you play it. Both give amazing insights into the mind of the developer and if you have any interest at all into “what goes on behind the wall” then both games are a must play.
Here are spoiler free reviews from Jim Sterling on both games. And both games have to be played unspoiled for you to get the full impact. The Beginners Guide haunted me for days.
http://www.thejimquisition.com/2015/10/the-beginners-guide-review/
Moved to the Game Room. Please note this thread was started in 2005.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
In City of Heroes there would be periodic bugs that let people fly over the “War Walls” surrounding the city zones. You could fly around the outside "skyscrapers and see that they were 2-D, or fly under the city. You could also attack enemies throguh the ground without retaliation, and otherwise interact with anyhting that was close enoguh to the ground. I recall how before Inventions came out, some people used that trick to get a sneak preview of the tutorial in the university for the Inventions system. They couldn’t get all the way through though, because the NPCs on the upper floor were out of range.
It was also possible in some of the Arachnos maps to accidentally or on purpose to get outside of the map (usually with Teleport or knockback); in that case you found yourself in a black room that contained the map.
In Minecraft getting outside the map puts you in “the Void”, a black area where you lose health until you die. If you are set to invincible, you fall until the game crashes, presumably due to some kind of overflow error.
Minecraft also had “The Far Lands”, extremely distant regions where the terrain generating algorithms broke down and everything got surreal. Also, the game got all jumpy and would possibly crash. Eventually this was fixed, though.
Actually you don’t need no clipping for that; I got there without ever hearing of no clipping.
In Mad Max, the game world is surrounded by the Big Nothing – a never-ending barren wasteland. You can drive into it though you quickly start taking damage and die. If you mod the game for infinite life, you can drive in a single direction for about eight minutes before the game starts glitching and crashes. Mind you, it’s eight thrilling minutes of staring at the same flat white plain and blowing dust effects.
I recall the occasional glitch where I popped through a wall and fell to my death, or got stuck. I rarely tried to find them, myself. What happens to the player if they pass a clipping barrier depends entirely on the game engine and the map.
I think my favorite “noclip” adventure was in Half Life. That part at the beginning where the G-Man is speaking with a scientist behind a locked door, and all you can hear are their muffled voices. If you noclip through that door, you find that the recorded audio is just the muffled voices. That didn’t surprise me in the least, but it was still hilarious to continually smack the invulnerable G-Man with a crowbar while he smiled at me and kept spouting “Mummumum um mum, murble mumm mum murble mumm.”
That, and I once clipped through “time” in Secret of Mana. I know it’s not remotely the same thing, but I once had a glitch where I opened a treasure chest that resulted in a ton of empty, nested dialogue boxes, and ultimately kicked off a cutscene hours later in the game. For fear of losing my save, I decided to reset, rather than see how deep that glitch went.
Now, for a real glitch, there was a bug in one of the Pokemon games that let you literally entirely reprogram the game. There are videos online of people turning the game into Pong or the like, and then playing that.
And as it happened, that bug started with a sequence break. By using ultra-precise timing, you could swim further than you were supposed to be able, and reach an island before you were supposed to be able to reach it, and where the game thus hadn’t yet loaded all the relevant data. From there, the trick lay in manipulating the game into loading the particular data you wanted it to.
In the N64 game Goldeneye, there’s a part of Dam Island/The Citadel that was cut from the game for space, time limitations, but you can get there using a GameShark.
The original Metroid for the Nintendo was famous for this. Only about 20% or so of the game’s map was actually meant to be used. The rest, if the player knows how to get to it, is a computer-generated maze of tunnels, nonsensical room arrangements, and glitches. Here’s a YouTube video of someone exploring it (part 1 wasn’t very interesting).
Just last night I was playing Fallout 3, and at the invisible border just south of Tenpenny Tower, I could see a Deathclaw. If I tried to move towards it, I couldn’t (I was right on the southern edge of the map) but I could shoot it (managed to knock it down to just about dead, but then it ran off/out of targeting range).
It doesn’t take long to figure out (or remember from Oblivion) that some persistent jumping can help you navigate difficult terrain and blaze some shortcuts between points A & B.
I was doing this in Skyrim along the western border mountains in Markarth and found myself crossing them! The terrain spilled away westward and could be traveled easily. There were no trees, no rocks, no critters, nothing else out there–just rolling hills and grass, and the occasional cliff. The game map showed my position as being in the mountains west of Markarth. Everything worked fine, there was just nothing particularly interesting out there. I ran generally south and west for a long time (maybe 20-30 minutes) hoping against hope I’d run into the High Rock or Hammerfell provinces and start a new life, but I never did. Eventually I decided there was nothing out there and reloaded at my last save. If I’d have been smarter about it I would have tried reentering Skyrim from the south, like around Falkreath. But I’m not particularly smart.
I once fell through the streets of Venice into the water underneath it in Assassin’s Creed 2 while playing on the XBOX 360. I was able to swim around for a bit, but couldn’t actually do anything because I was stuck following the street layout without actually being anywhere.
[QUOTE=engineer_comp_geek]
…In the original DOOM game, if you cheated you could get behind a big wall where you saw the game developer’s head on a pike.
[/QUOTE]
It was John Romero’s head, who at that time still worked for Id, and the level was the final level from Doom 2, “Icon of Sin.”
Since the thread has been resurrected, in Borderlands 2, there are places you can shoot but cannot get to, and flying creatures can fly off-map. And you can use grenade-jumping to access areas you should not.
Yeah, this is one of my all-time favorite moments in a game. As a player, I felt like I was breaking the game. As a character, GladOS started scolding me for breaking the game. Although the game I was playing, and the game my character was playing, were two different games, at that moment I felt closer to my character’s emotions than at any other moment of computer gaming in my life.