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Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

Dwarf Fortress is good for this sort of thing.. Especially the famous case of the poisoned cats https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-04-13-why-dwarf-fort...

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The difference being that DF is specifically designed for emergent behaviour because it's probably the most system-driven game in existence - this fox AI feature is totally accidental.

I really love emergent gameplay and I only say this because I was rather let down by skyrim's lack of emergence compared to morrowind.

What are the examples of emergence in Morrowind?

The best examples are related to the magic and alchemy systems: you can break the game in many different ways, the classic one being to use fortify intelligence potions to boost your alchemy skill and then make new fortify intelligence potions until you have effectively infinite skill and extremely valuable potions. You can also use levitation and chameleon spells to access areas or items early.

It's not a /very/ emergent game but it has more to offer than skyrim. The speedrun completes in something like 10 minutes using a variety of exploits.

I may be wrong on this but I also feel like Skyrim lacked the kinds of magical items Morrowind had that basically required you to think up clever magical hacks to make them useful eg Boots of Blinding Speed

Yeah that's true - morrowind has game breaking items like boots of blinding speed, where you need to abuse the games mechanics to make them actually useful. Same with the jumping scroll you find early on - if you just use it, you're gonna die from fall damage.

By the end of my last (vanilla) playthrough I could fly through the sky like superman at 100mph, you really can't do things like that in skyrim.

Levitate 1pt on target in 100ft for 30s FTW?

I had a levitate spell, and fortify jump + slowfall + boots of blinding speed. If I could run and jump I did, otherwise I used levitate because it was slower. Also because I was Telvanni and they really can't do without levitate!

> otherwise I used levitate because it was slower

That's the point of levitate on target. ;) (On enemies, of course.)

Oh yeah haha I don't think I really used it on enemies, on my destruction mage I just levitated myself out of harm's way and used fire spells to cheese melee enemies.

The results of levitate on target may vary depending on the game engine used, but it's generally fun.

That doesn't seem like emergent behaviour

Emergent behaviour is higher order behaviour that is created by interaction between rules. The rules "higher INT = better potions" and "fortify INT potion increases INT" are the rules that interact to form a positive feedback loop of infinite INT. That's emergence.

In Skyrim there’s the fortify enchanting potion and fortify alchemy enchantment loop. You can get arbitrarily powerful enchantments and potions.

Yeah I know there's still some emergent game breakers in skyrim, but morrowind had more open ended tools with which to mess with the system.

Here's the bug report where players figure out what is happening 2 comments in, if you don't want to watch a 40 minute video (I almost never watch video and find them slow and boring and regret the loss of text in the web)

https://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/mantisbt/view.php?id=9195

Another great game with a lot of this is The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

Its chemistry engine which allows "elements" (heat, wind, electricity, magnetism,...) and material properties (combustible, magnetic, metallic,...) to react without any specific scripts per item.

This leads to cases such as when I chopped down an apple tree with an enchanted fire sword. The sword made the tall grass catch fire. This created an updraft. Wood from the tree caught fire and turned into a fireplace (with a prompt to sit and wait by the fire). The apples turned into baked apples from the heat.

Spoiler / tl;dw: the cats were dying of alcohol poisoning. This was a bit surprising, since cats do not drink alcohol. What was happening instead was that they were getting covered in alcohol by walking through puddles, and then consumed the alcohol while licking themselves clean.

The bug that was eventually fixed was that a cat that walked through a spilled mug and cleaned itself shouldn't have been considered to have drunk a whole mug.

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