Team Fortress 2 and Titanfall 2
Movement shooters
Team Fortress 2 and Titanfall 2 are both old games, being released in 2007 and 2016 respectively. Both games are still played to this day, and stay relevant in game design because of their excellent movement and weapon mechanics, among other things.
"Source Engine" or Quake movement
The movement systems in these games, which I want to analyse, originated from the game Quake from 1996. Quake had a few bugs in its movement system that allowed players to significantly surpass the intended player speed. These bugs were highly praised by the gaming community, and were replicated in games such as Team Fortress 2 and Titanfall 2.
The bugs
The bugs in question include air-strafing, which is a method of moving in the air that increases speed, and bunny-hopping, which reduced friction from walking on the ground by jumping on the same frame the player landed. Combined with blast-jumping, an intended game mechanic where the player gets knocked back by explosions, which the player can cause through their explosive weaponry so they can launch themselves, and the end result is that the players can move so much quicker than intended.
Fix or feature
The main lession game designers can learn from this is to analyse bugs and decide whether they enhance the game, or are a detriment. Not only can this save development time, but also lead to higher player skill expression, or other benefits. That said, these bugs do sometimes end up fixed by their respective developers.
Other notable bugs that enhanced player skill expression
This is an non-exhaustive list of games that I have played that also had bugs that enhanced player skill expression: