10 Ways Video Games Were Forced To Control Players
These games found ingenious ways to make you behave.
Video games are generally all about promoting player freedom and letting them do things they can't do in real life, because why the hell not? However, there are of course limits to this.
Developers don't always want you to have free rein to do everything, especially if it betrays their own vision for the story or gameplay, and makes the game something they never intended it to be.
While developers can generally only do so much to combat mischievous players playing the game in an unconventional, potentially game-breaking way, some clever devs have nevertheless found ways to implement ingenious counter-measures to minimise this sort of behaviour.
From amazing solutions to friendly fire in multiplayer shooters, to limiting a certain monetary exploit in a certain beloved RPG, to even protecting players from themselves, these games all felt compelled to do something to control players who just couldn't help it.
In some cases it left the player-base pissed off, while in others it was taken in good humour, and then there are those few that were actually received gratefully by the player base, because sometimes players actually need to be controlled...
10. Introducing Reverse Friendly Fire For Griefers - Rainbow Six Siege
For several years after it launched, Rainbow Six Siege had a huge problem with griefers exploiting the game's friendly fire mechanics to troll their own teammates, either dishing up hefty damage or straight-up killing their comrades.
With no punishment system in place for such actions, trolls could easily make Siege a miserable experience for anyone on the receiving end of their buffoonery.
That was until 2019, when Ubisoft finally introduced an ingenious system for combatting friendly fire - reverse friendly fire.
Basically, it ensures that any damage inflicted by a traitorous player is actually redirected to the offending griefer themselves, effectively nullifying the joy of attacking your own team entirely.
But crucially, reverse friendly fire also had a tolerance threshold in place to ensure that well-meaning players weren't punished, because of course in a game like Siege, stray bullets are inevitably going to fly from time to time.