(bright music) - [Falcon] Video games
are a big ol' magic trick. Sorry, illusion, sleight of hand. Video games, do stuff that isn't exactly, well, straightforward in
order to sell the image. Hi folks, it's Falcon,
and today on Gameranx, 10 tricks games use to fool you. Starting off with number
10, in scripted moments when games dynamically
adjust the animations depending on your speed. You know those big
setpiece moments in games where everything's crumbling, but you manage to escape at
the last possible second? There's a lot of ways to go about trying to create these moments. Sometimes you have strict timing, so the only way you'll get through them is at the last possible second,
but that can be frustrating. It could kill the momentum of the game if you're repeating a scripted section of a game over and over, and these days, most games just fake it. As described by Kurt Margenau, Naughty Dog developed a technique where they would work
backwards from the final jump and make it so that
timing on the entire event would changed depending on how quickly you're getting through
it, which allows the event to be a lot more forgiving
than it normally would be while still ending at the perfect time. Naughty Dog and Insomniac
are kinda the masters of this sort of thing. It can sometimes be pretty difficult to notice the game is slowing
down, while with other games, it's not so seamless, let's just say. Among other things, they mentioned the train
falling off the cliff segment in the original Uncharted 2 as
the place where this started. If you look close enough, you can see it happening
all over the place. (train creaking)
(intense music) In pretty much any Sony
game with scripted moments, like, I'm guessing that
became standard practice for internal developers
at Sony across the board. And number nine is
instructive level design. One of the more benign
tricks of game design is the way games attempt to
naturally introduce concepts and challenges in a
low-pressure environment as a way for the player to
naturally grow accustomed to these obstacles before
throwing the player into the proverbial deep end. It's one of those game design concepts you never really notice
until you hear about, then you see it everywhere. It's reading the Matrix code, basically. It's been in games as far
back as Mario Brothers in '85, back when games didn't even
allow for in-game tutorials, and not 'cause it was
some rule or something, it was just technology made it so if you did have a tutorial, it would just be impossibly bad, so they had to teach the
players through level design. The game introduces the
question mark blocks and your first enemy at the same time with nothing else present, and it makes it easy for
new players to experiment and learn as you jump into
a box, jump onto a Goomba. Take pretty much any level
from Super Mario Wonder. They all work like this, too. A new level gimmick is introduced in a relatively safe space for players. They can easily engage with
it, learn to understand it, then the gamer ramps it the hell up. Hell, Elden Ring does this. As you know, Elden Ring starts off with a question mark box
and a Goomba right there. No, I'm joking. A lot of the time, the first
time you encounter an enemy, they're by themselves in a large area. That's what I'm talking about. There's no Goombas and question mark boxes that I am aware of in Elden Ring, but there's plenty of opportunities to understand how stuff
works before you have to fight an enemy in a
larger area, for instance. It's not necessarily a deception, and it's also maybe a positive thing. That said, it's really easy
to ignore it or overlook it, so when you start noticing it everywhere, it's the green Matrix code falling from the top of the screen. You're like, ah! And number eight is tricks of scale. Scale in video games can be very weird. There's no real depth perception in games, so it can be hard to tell just how close or far away something is, and designers use that to their advantage. Take a game like Halo, set in
these large open environments. Somehow, they manage to make weapons stand out from the rest of the world, and it just took this one little trick. Listen, I'm putting this here, 'cause this amazing
picture posted on Reddit by AftermaThXCVII. I don't know which of those letters are supposed to be numbers. I'm not from Rome, but
credit goes to that person, and it reveals the horrible truth. When weapons are on the ground, they're scaled up to be bigger so that they're easier to spot. In comparison, it looks absurd. That is a huge pistol,
which that's what she said. (Falcon laughing) Did you notice, though? I
didn't notice. I never have. I've been playing these games since the original Xbox, Combat Evolved. It's one of those little changes that, if it were real life,
it'd be super obvious, but because it's a video
game, I never noticed. They tricked me, and honestly, it makes the game better for it. And number seven, the many tricks they use to make anime characters 3D. A lot has been said about
Arc System Works' approach to animating their fighting games, like Guilty Gear and Dragon Ball FighterZ, but even if you're aware of the way these games intentionally animate the way a drawn cartoon character would rather than a 3D animation,
it doesn't properly convey just how much these games have to cheat to make their animations
look as anime is possible. There's obvious stuff, like
anytime a character is shown at a side angle, their
mouth is literally moved to the side of their face
to make it look right, but the proportions of these
characters can be wild, all over the place, to create all those recognizable
poses and animations. Take any moment in a fighting game where the character pulls
their fist up to the screen. It may look totally natural
from the screen perspective, but at any different angle, everything about it is totally nuts. It's just... Look at this. The game's making their
fist look three times bigger so the pose looks more dynamic and like how it's drawn in anime. (Faust speaks Japanese)
(intense metal music) (Faust speaks Japanese)
(explosion) (Faust chattering)
(machinery whirring) (Faust speaks Japanese)
(machinery whirring) Even something as basic as
a simple facial expression could look perfect at the correct angle, but completely deranged
and messed up from another. The amount of work these guys put in to make a 3D model animate like
a 2D cartoon, it's amazing, and it's honestly kinda magic. And number six is space. Going into space in any video game requires a lot of trickery. Doesn't matter what
game you're looking at, but for Starfield to do it, they really had to stretch
the Creation Engine, because it's an engine
that was made in 1999. On a previous list, I
mentioned how they managed to make a train work in Fallout 3 by making it a hat for an NPC. The tricks to get Starfield into space aren't quite that out there, but they required some pretty
creative problem solving from the developers. So in Starfield, how does space work? Well, when you're in space,
you're really in a zone the game generates
based off your location. It generates the planets as
celestial objects in the sky to match where you appear
to be on the space map. What's interesting about space, it's basically a big box around your ship, but the actual space
part is just an illusion. If you take your character and cheat your way outside your ship, you'll just keep falling until
you hit the edge of the map. That's the interesting thing
about this whole thing. You can touch the edge of
the map as your character, but if you're flying, the
ship can just go on forever. - [Grandma] ...some food. If you wanna come on over, just pop on by. (dramatic music) - [Falcon] I'm not 100%
certain exactly how it works, but it's likely that
your ship is the center and everything else moves around it. That's why if you're flying,
it's actually possible to fly to other planets without
going into a loading screen. The planets themselves aren't
solid objects, however. They're basically just window dressing, but when you're actually flying around, the illusion, it's pretty convincing. At number five, the illusion of movement. In video games, there's a lot of moments where you seem like you're
moving, but you're really not. It's everything else
that's actually in motion. It may be how the previous
point actually works, not the case in every game. A lot of 'em actually do have moving through some form of
environment, but there's a lot where your character is the fixed variable and everything else moves around them. As an example, a game like Hades doesn't always have this
happen, but there's a part where you're riding a ferry, and the ship doesn't actually move, it's the islands around it. It's primary an engine solution so they can work around the
issue of moving something while your character's standing
on it, but in other games, the issues are a little more fundamental. Take the Outer Wilds. It's a game that's full of
complex physics simulations. You might assume the only
stationary object in the world is the sun, but that's
actually not the case. It's also moving. The actual stationary
point is your character. Everything revolves
around you in this game. The reason is your character needs to be at the center of the
world's coordinate space, literally 0, 0, 0. Otherwise all these physics simulations start running into floating point errors and it causes stuttering
and performance errors, stuff like that. So for example, when
you jump in Outer Wilds, you're not actually moving. The planet goes down under
you and then comes back again. It's kinda mind-bending to think about, but in practice, you'll never notice, 'cause it comes off not like that. And number four, online multiplayer is basically one big trick. The big misconception
is that you're playing with other people, and you're not really. Now, I'm not saying I'm an expert, but maybe let me explain
it a little bit better. It doesn't matter how fast
connection speeds are, it's not possible for games
to completely accurately send all player data, all
shooting trajectories, all that stuff at all
times in split seconds between hundreds of players, so the game actually sends
the absolute minimum amount of information possible, and then that's translated
in game land there. I'm not necessarily
the best to explain it, so I'm gonna quote a Reddit
post from TheMiiChannelTheme which I think accurately
illustrates what's going on. "If it's a 24-player lobby, there's 24 different games
in progress concurrently, 25 in a client-server model. Your own actions affect
other people's games, and theirs affect yours, but ultimately, they're
separate experiences. Each client has its own
reality populated by one player and 23 slave puppets trying
to match other players as best they can." (bombs exploding)
(players yelling) (gun chattering) - [Announcer] Hostiles are
invading one of our objectives! (players yelling) (gun chattering) (bombs exploding)
(players yelling) - [Falcon] And once you understand this, most online errors start
to make perfect sense. It's a somewhat asynchronous experience. Ultimately, when people
talk about good netcode, they don't mean games that
manage to connect players better, but they really mean is that the game is just better at guessing. It just shows how incredibly complex coding an online game can be. and while I'm really only
scratching the surface here, it's fascinating looking at
the crazy tricks programmers have pulled off to make their online games more fun and responsive. And number three, in-game shadowbans. If you're put a leaderboard in a game, people are gonna cheat to get to the top. Doesn't matter how
pointless the leaderboard is or how underplayed the game is, there's somebody that's gonna
cheat to get to the top. Tons of games have these kind of problems, but at least one developer on Reddit came up with a pretty novel solution. A post by the user KarmaAdjuster, their game pulled a
little trick on cheaters. They had software to detect
if a score had been cheated, but instead of banning the player, they hid the fraudulent high scores from legitimate players' leaderboards, effectively shadow banning them. The dev mentioned something
that, if you ban them, it's likely they'll just come back with more sophisticated cheats, but if you just hide their
scores from everyone else, they'll keep going, just
thinking everything's fine. It's a clever idea. Shame the dev never actually revealed what game the trick was used in, but I guess that would
kind of defeat the purpose of the shadowban if
everybody knew about it. And number two is bizarre ways games transform your character. It's one of those kinds of
tricks games do all the time in the background simply
because it's easier than the alternative. In a lot of games, instead of
just going through the trouble of making a new model or
modifying existing assets, they sorta just jam things together, 'cause the player's never gonna see it, so when you do get people
to look behind the curtain, like with the channel Boundary Break, you can find some pretty bizarre stuff, like how Mario uses the
Cannon Box in Mario 3D world. Like, look at this. This is
actually what the game does. It shrinks Mario's head and arms so they're ridiculously
small in order to hide 'em while you're using the cannon. I'm not sure what I
expected, but it wasn't this. Games do this sort of thing all the time, but you rarely get the
opportunity to see it. And number two, 2D games
when they're actually 3D. There have been a lot
of throwback 2D games. They look totally legit. You would never in a million
years suspect anything from looking at 'em, but if
you take control of the camera, get a peek behind the curtain,
you can see the awful truth. These are not 2D games at all. I mean, it's not really an awful truth, but it's kinda surprising. A lot of games are like this, too, but the ones that surprise me the most are Cuphead and Shovel Knight. These games don't have
3D elements in them, yet here they are. The reason for this is simple, of course. The engines used for these games
are primarily for 3D games, but they offer more options than something that's a purely 2D engine, so they use what they have. In Cuphead, a lot of the elements are projected onto a single
surface, but with Shovel Knight, all the different assets are separate, and it makes the game look
like a shadowbox or something. It's actually pretty cool. I'm surprised they never used it anywhere, but I guess Yacht Club
Games wanted to stay as authentic to eight-bit as they could. And that's all for today. Leave us a comment, let
us know what you think. If you like this video, click like. If you're not subscribed,
it's a great time to do so. We upload brand-new videos
every day of the week. Best way to see them first,
of course, is subscription, so click subscribe. Don't forget to enable notifications, and as always, thank you very
much for watching this video. I'm Falcon. You can follow me on
Twitter at FalconTheHero. We'll see you next time
right here on Gameranx.
