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RE: Ultima VII - The Black Gate
what a great story you told there. Who would have thought to use the baby as weapon... haha. I love how you could interact with pretty much anything, anywhere in this game. It made it so much fun to explore. Of course it became evident pretty quickly if you were out of your element because unless you took the approach that you just described by spending a long time fighting one enemy, you didn't stand a chance.
I suppose we have games like this today still but most of them are 3-D open-word games, which i also love but wish there were groups instead of just one person.
I found out years later that they wanted to write a more generic system. So everything had a weight and toughness. They made the baby appropriate for a baby, but since it was a plot item, they gave it more toughness to make sure it wouldn't get destroyed and ruined the plot. At the time, it was just a "what would happen" that I love in gaming.
Apparently games like Divnity - Original Sin has a lot of emergent gameplay but the really big one was Nethack (and much later, Dwarf Fortress). They took a lot of effort to figure out how things interact with each other so I would occasionally stumble on unexpected behavior like when you use a charm wand on a nurse demon, you'd get something special.
I was recently playing Undermine and they had a couple emergent bits of code like if you drop a bomb near meat, it will cook it, or being able to turn on the torches if you are on fire. Those little things are my favorite part of gaming.