In the world of
video games physics can be easily bended.
Sometimes it is intentional for the immersion of the video game like
moves that disable your gravity, or a roundhouse kick that sends you across a
massive room. Other times you can confuse the physics engine’s force detection
and calculation which end up adding forces to a particular object that should
not exist in the first place. I have
solid evidence that such exploits or perhaps immersion techniques are used in the
video game Archeage Online.
One
of the transportation methods in Archeage is the ability to deploy a glider and
use it to ride the wind for great distances and sometimes when it feels there
is no wind at all. However if you ride
the glider for too long or decide to put the glider away while midflight the obvious
happens, you fall to the ground. I hypothesize
due to the laws of gravity that during a freefall upon reaching the ground my
character will die or be critically injured in the process.
As
you can see during the freefall I
activated an ability that allows my character to do a backwards dodge. This removed my entire downwards momentum and
instead somehow generated a force in the reverse direction out of the air. In the real world for someone to experience
what just happened there must be a force given back by an object strong enough
to propel one that far, something to exert a force back on my character. In Archeage this is not the case. When the
ability is activated the physics engine grants the character a force in said
direction. Also as you may notice a bit
of damage was incurred by character but not enough for it to be lethal and far
from life-like. This was the momentum my
character gained from the end of my ability and as you can see the downward
acceleration from gravity was nullified. In a real world situation if one
somehow managed to experience such a force to propel them backwards they would
feel the same amount of pain, or death, regardless of the forces acting in the
orthogonal directions.
Another
transportation method in Archeage is the ability to traverse the open seas in a
boat which come in different shapes and sizes.
The boat I am manning in the next video has a harpoon attached to the
front intended to grapple on to other boats so you can board and plunder them.
However something that is not intended is the ability to fire the harpoon to
the sea floor, and pull oneself under.
Isolating the physics of the boat only I hypothesis that the boat will
continually sink once it has been submerged by the harpoon cannon.
Honestly the
actual outcome was more entertaining that watching a boat sink. In the real world the boat would sink because
the boat is heavier than water and the buoyancy of the boat is negligible if
there is water on the deck. Once water
has made it aboard the boat, once there is enough of it, it will weigh the boat
down and lower its potential buoyancy until the point where it will just
continually sink. The physics in
Archeage does not calculate it that way.
The engine is told that the object you are on is a boat and as such it
is to float weightlessly on water. Should it be in contact with water the physics
engine will repel the boat. When the whole boat becomes submerged the
calculated physics when the harpoon line is cut is the repel force is massive
since the boats position has already been moved so far underwater and such the
boat experiences that massive force away from the water.
This
video also brings up a lot of other physics based anomalies. Such as the fact that the harpoon is hand
cranked. Can you imagine the amount of torque a human would have to apply to a
harpoon to completely submerge such a big boat? Or perhaps how my character’s
stance did not change as she was tilted 90 degrees. Did my character experience any force by the
water as she was pulled under? Many
games do not implement these physics phenomenons into their engine because it
would be too hard to calculate and keep track of all of them at once.
For
my next trick I shall attack a fellow enemy player by using a skill called
Bubble Trap and experience its effects.
I hypothesize that my victim will feel the effects of the bubble trap
and be suspended and unable to move.
This experiment, unlike the other two, bends real world physics for the
idea of immersion the others were exploits of bugs in the physics engine.
As you can see
from the video my victim was in fact suspended by a water bubble for several
seconds. The interesting thing to note
is it actually will lift a character and
in some cases it can lift them to a lethal height where upon breaking gravity
can be used to smite your enemy. This
sadly was not high enough but the mind bending physics is noticeable. What happens here is when someone is affected
by Bubble Trap is their current forces are nullified; the victim is raised and
held for a few seconds then is dropped. No explanation goes into how a fragile
bubble can possibly hold a person, it is sorcery after all, so in this case the
physics of Archeage is to immerse the player in how it would feel to cast
magic. Also there happen to be a lot of
skills in the game that nullify the current forces of the target, some are bugs
and others are for effect.
As a whole most
video game engines don't take into account every little physical experience that
can happen in the real world, just enough to get the job done. But as we have seen the short-comings of the
engine can be intended for immersion to make an imaginary world, or perhaps
just make the game more fun even if it’s unintended like with sling-shotting boats
into the sky.
