Gaming

Basically all of NetHack, but if I had to pick one thing, it would be the fact that the devs foresee things that don't even exist in the game. For example, if you polymorph yourself into a monster that can eat metal and then eat a trident, you get a humorous message referencing Trident bubble gum. A similar message exists for when you eat a piece of flint (referencing the Flintstones, naturally), despite the fact that there are no monsters in the game that can eat rocks. In other words, that message can never be seen in the vanilla version of the game, but the devs prepared it anyway just in case you mod such a monster in.

For decades, the phrase "The DevTeam Thinks Of Everything" has been the most common phrase to refer to the devs in the NetHack community, whatever foresight the devs of other games have shown, the NetHack DevTeam goes so much further, they tend to program even obscure interactions that a reasonable player would never find

Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Although, it's less foresight for random actions and more of a way to set the tone for the rest of the game.

There are two possible outcomes of how one of the early missions plays out, depending on actions you wouldn't initially consider.

There's a hostage crisis and if you don't listen to Sarif and get to the transport on time, they'll all be dead when you arrive there.

Thing is, you're not really given like a ticking clock on the top of your screen or anything. And in most games, you expect the "meet me there now" thing to not actually matter much, because oftentimes NPCs will act either as if we're perfectly on time or just make a minor note about it in dialogue. We're also used to most missions starting the same or only with minor differences depending on choice, but there is no explicit choice here.

So if you treat it like any other game, ignore the quest marker, and just wander around the building, exploring and looking for interesting shit before actually leaving, you arrive at the location and get berated because you took too long and now a bunch of innocent people are dead because you were fucking around.

If you go immediately, you have a chance to actually save them all.

I think you'll actually find a lot of stuff like this in immersive sims, just due to their nature, although it's less "we know you're going to do this exact thing" and more "you've got freedom and we know you're going to do something we didn't expect, so we'll embrace that instead of limiting your options".

I know that when Arkane was developing Prey, they knew the GLOO Cannon was going to be experimented with in a bunch of ways that they couldn't necessarily anticipate, so instead of imposing limits on it, they embraced it, gave the gun to you at the beginning (well, very close to beginning) and just said "go wild".

They basically turned what would otherwise just be a random, only semi-important utility into a super useful tool for traversal and combat engagement. Went from "cool, does gluey things" to "okay, I'm going to make a staircase with this thing because it looks like there's something up there".

Apparently, they were inspired by Bethesda's famous lack of usable ladders up until that point, which is pretty funny. Or rather, they used that as a metaphor for design in general (though, they did put up posters or notes or something that just said "NO FUCKING LADDERS", if I recall, but I'll have to find the video/article about that later).

It was basically this approach of "there doesn't need to be a ladder if you can make one yourself".

The Stanley Parable, the whole game.

Funny that they thought of that, but then slipped up that you could become archmage before you have to ask the archmage for help. But there's no dialogue for the quest if you are the archmage. So if you progress in the wrong order, you get stuck in the main quest.

They may have fixed it since, but that was a huge error.

2 game franchises came into my mind

• Zero Escape series, since I replayed it recently, and managed to skip some steps. It's a flowchart game, so developer's foresight is kinda needed.
• Metal Gear and anything by Hideo Kojima, I just found out while researching for this reply, that in Death Stranding since you can create pee grenade to damage BT, you can even pee on them directly.

I don't want to spoil it too much, but let's just say that the developers of Dishonored 2 knew some players would love exploring so they gave those players an amazing reward in the final boss fight.