Glitches and bugs are as old as computers are and thus have been a constant companion to games too. No matter how simple or complicated a game may be, there’s almost no making it ironclad in terms of programming. I’m no code jockey, but it just looks to me that code segments often interact in unexpected ways and those interactions lead to either catastrophic or hilarious results. I came across an interesting programming quirk in a game I’ve been playing, so now I’m wondering where exactly the line between a true bug and feature-like one truly lies.

I’d say the prime example of a harmless feature-like bug is the giants’ ability to launch the Dragonborn into the stratosphere in Skyrim. It 100% wasn’t intended, but that didn’t stop it from becoming the single funniest way to die in the game. You could even say it was exemplary of the qualities that make Skyrim what it is. That is, a place where anything can happen.

I’d say that another one is the general ability to go out of bounds (and come back) in a given game. It’s absolutely not intended, but it’s still something that’s cool to do as a player. I remember trying to find out of bounds areas with my friends in the original Destiny tower. There were two places if I remember correctly, and it was all kinds of fun confusing other guardians from those hidden spots.

There were bugs that really were detriments to the original Destiny 1 experience, though. The first, and perhaps most famous, was the very bugged and very OP Vex Mythoclast weapon during its first two weeks of life. I don’t remember how the bug functioned exactly, but that it had something to do with how damage was calculated due to the weapons’s status as a fusion rifle. The effect, though, was insane.

It was practically a rapid-firing Golden Gun. That is, it could down a guardian in about a second. With its high rate of fire, though, it was practically a one-shot machine, enabling guardians to wipe entire enemy teams without even using a full clip. Yeah, that one had to go. Another such bug was the old Ethernet cable yank glitch/exploit against Crota in the old Crota’s End raid. All a team had to do was have one member DC during the first damage phase in the Crota fight, and the boss would be permanently frozen in a vulnerable state. You could skip the whole fight this way. It was certainly convenient for players, but, yeah, not a great bug.

The bug I encountered recently, if indeed it is a bug, is something that enables players to do something that they otherwise can’t. It’s enabled by an odd interaction of two items, and the result is the constant and consistent launching of rockets. Rockets are quite powerful in the game hosting this bug, so getting access to lots of them is pretty crazy.

And yet, the ability to use more rockets does not outclass several of the other intentionally designed builds and combinations. So I wonder if this would actually fall into the category of an unintentional feature rather than that of a game-breaking bug. There is the possibility that it could enable a little too much power too early, but is that enough to put something firmly in the “bug” camp? I don’t think so. It doesn’t equate to an easy win like the Vex Mythoclast or Crota bugs described above, so I would argue that it’s not so severe a problem. It’s not as harmless as the Skyrim giant glitch, though, so I suppose I could see arguments made to the contrary.

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What do you think, though? Is an unintended advantage enough to pull something out of the “unintended feature” category and land squarely in “bug” territory? How game breaking does something need to be for that to happen? What are some bugs that you think fit these descriptions?

Image from the Steam page