Linear Progression Games that get derailed

[jon2]

Due to its translation patch getting updated here, I encountered
Ore ga Omae o Mamoru: I Will Protect You for the DS

In it there was a game mechanic (or prolly a bug) that allows for a higher and longer air hang time during a jump by throwing a ranged weapon at the zenith of a jump

Then there is a location seemingly inaccessible without a "double jump" as it was too high; that part leads to the second level of the game. I tried out that "game mechanic" (which is already usable from the beginning) and voila! I climbed up there and entered the second level; bypassing a boss (or two, idk)

The question is: ARE THERE ANY OTHER GAMES THAT, DUE TO A GAME MECHANIC OR BUG, ALLOWS THE PLAYER TO BYPASS THE STORY PROGRESSION? And what happens if you do so?

 

[DeadVoivod]

Don't the speedrunners do that in almost every game? They always find some glitches.

 

[bjork]

In Symphony of the Night you can use the wolf form in the clock room to access the coliseum early. You can also use it to skip the Richter fight entirely. You can use a duplicator and two heart refreshes to fall through the floor and skip around places (this also lets you 200.6% the E3 97 demo, which normally stops you from progressing after the minotaur/werewolf fight).

In Harmony of Dissonance, I forget the exact combo, but you can use the giant ice fist thing with a well-timed jump to sequence break and get to a later area far earlier than you normally would.

In Fallout 3, you can go to a pile of rubble near the Citadel and fall through, find yourself inside the area where the Citadel should be but the graphics aren't loaded in so it's just a large crater, and when you reach the door to the Citadel, you can enter it and skip a giant chunk of the story. You can immediately do this upon exiting 101 and walking to the Citadel.

In New Vegas, you can sneak past the Deathclaws in Sloan and get to Freeside at level 1, skipping the entirety of Primm and Nipton and all that, if you so choose.

It doesn't skip story, but in Metroid you can press up out of a bomb jump and get a sort of double jump to get around a little easier too.

There's lots of these.

 

[Graw]

Super Metroid has a bunch of speed running tricks like that. The mockball's a fun one to pull off for the early super missile skip so you can bypass spore spawn. It's easy to learn and you can do it early in the game. You can also skip all the grapple beam stuff with wall jumps and shine sparks so you don't ever actually have to fight crocomire either.

Crystal Project has a somewhat linear intro section but you can just skip the entire thing, go on a bit of a convoluted journey, get the underwater mount and pretty much open the entire game up from the very beginning if you know where to go and what to do.

Hollow Knight has a ton of places where you can pogo jump off enemies and stuff to reach places you normally need the dash or double jump to get to.

Link's awakening has a well known wrong warp glitch involving the chain chomp in town that can break the game open.

A lot of nes games have glitches that can be exploited just because of the way they were programmed.

Not quite the same but Axiom Verge took the idea of glitches and sequence breaking and incorporated it as part of the game mechanics.

Metroidvanias in general are great for this kind of thing because they tend to have an intended linear progression but due to the design of those types of games sequence breaking almost becomes inevitable just because it's hard to account for every single thing a player might do at any given point in time at any particular place on the map with a given set of powerups.

 

[RustySK]

That kind of exploit is usually referred to as a sequence break. The prototypical example of which would be Super Metroid, the rare kind of game that really starts to come into its own once you start breaking it.

 

[bjork]

Oh, I just remembered another: in Oblivion, it's possible to duplicate items. So if you reload a save inside of an Oblivion gate until you get the Sigil Stone that's got 30% chameleon, then duplicate that, you can make yourself completely invisible with armor enchantments and just walk around and only progress what you like. If you get a mission to go in a cave and kill a guy, you can sneak right up to him and shoot him in the ass with an arrow, then go back to looking around. Good stuff.

 

[Clippy]

Final Fantasy 7 is a cool example. Speedrunners broke the game to hell and back and they discovered, among other things, how to skip the parts of the game where you get to name your characters. When you do that they default to the names we all know and love with two exceptions iirc. Cloud becomes 'ExSOLDIE' ('R' is cut off because you're only supposed to be able to use 8 characters when naming someone) and Aeris becomes Aerith, meaning that the localization team had a really hard time deciding between the transliterations of her Japanese name and Aeris was a last-minute decision.