I was thinking about a few games where I have broken the tone or balance. Wondering what other people have done similar?
My two examples:
This War Of Mine. A moody, atmospheric game about survival and the toll of war. The city is randomly generated, but depending on what locations are available it is breakable. The most common way for me is a super market location with the event of a lone soldier preparing to attack a woman. If the player has a knife, backstabbing the soldier is an easy kill and nets an assault rifle as loot. An early game assault rifle opens a ton of possibilities when you learn how enemy AI works. AI enemies can be ambushed by making noise on the other side of a closed door, when the enemy is in their animation to open the door they are easy pickings. I have used this technique to single handed wipe out an entire military base which nets more food, weapons, and supplies than I’d ever need. My survivors end up living in a comfortable, fully upgraded house.
STALKER Shadow Of Chernobyl. This is a more messed up break. In the early game the player starts in a village of rookies, and down the road is a small military check point. I take the terrible starting pistol and shoot potshots at the military patrol to aggro them, and I lead them back to the rookie village. Once the military and rookies start fighting I go hide near Sidrovich’s bunker and go inside if somebody finds me (enemies don’t follow into the bunker). Eventually the military kill all the rookies but take casualties themselves and are wounded. I pick up a few guns and finish off the military survivors. Then make lots and lots of trips to Sidrovich to sell him dozens of assault rifles and armor sets.
Any fallout game: Immediately crank your luck to 10.
I once intentionally used the console in fallout 4 to set all SPECIAL to 10 and unlocked every perk (including the gender-locked ones for the ultimate bisexual survivor) and it was the most bonkers fun I’ve had in a fallout game in a long time.
I recently did a 9 luck run in Fallout 1 (I intended to increase the luck by 1 in-game with a special event) and it can be very broken.
Early combat was very difficult. I had a high agility, but very low strength and low hit point character. I had difficulty fighting molerats. Even with the small guns skill tagged I could only beat molerats by burst firing an SMG. Raiders or anything else toasted me.
But eventually, with my high luck and tagged gambling skill I raised gambling up to the point where I was more statistically likely to win than lose. I walked into a casino, went to a slot machine and held down the enter key. The game has no counter balance to winning at gambling. Casinos have infinite caps and they won’t kick you out for winning.
Once I had something like 100,000 caps I walked over and bought out all the available guns and gear. I might have been low level and physically weak, but I was wearing combat armor and had a burst firing shotgun.
Eventually I got the Red Ryder BB gun. With my low strength I couldn’t use large guns well, but a BB gun was easy to handle. Ammo weighed almost nothing. And I could fire three times in a turn. With my luck, hits were basically guarenteed to be critical. I could explode super mutants with a single shot.
I killed the final boss with a BB gun.