Misused: The Dev Team Thinks Of Everything

I started trying to clean up some misuse of this earlier but I'm not sure exactly how far to take it. Basically, the deal is that The Dev Team Thinks of Everything is supposed to be about cases where the game has a response for obscure actions the player might try to do, but people have recently started to tend to use it for any case in which the developers paid attention to detail, even if it's not involving a response to a player action, or if it's something a player would be reasonably expected to end up doing. I've seen examples involving things like the level design or the animations, which are right in front of the player's face the whole time and have nothing to do with what they did. It looks like most of the examples on the page itself are fine, but there's a lot of links to it to possibly comb through.

I agree. Its overused. I can see one of two standards being applied.

1) Things that make sense to do but the game in no way prompts you to do and which you wouldn't think the developers would have accounted for (you see this a lot in well written Open World games where you can play interrelated quests in a variety of orders).

2) Really insane obscure things that both aren't a part of the normal gameplay and don't make sense to do unless you're just goofing around but the developer thought of it and included it anyway.

Yes, I've noticed in the past that this trope has undergone a lot of Trope Decay; quite a lot of it is just Gushing About Games You Like. The trope is supposed to be that a game contains an absurdly high number of scripted interactions, not "the game had a response that surprised me" or "the game has a few easter eggs".

Looking over the page, I believe that almost all of the examples are wrong; generally speaking, if any game listed has only two or three examples of "things the dev team thought of", then it's not this trope. For example, listings like "every single item in the game has its own message when you try to use it on yourself" or that a character "has a unique sprite for standing on ledges" are standard for the genre.

I think we need to either do an Example Sectionomy and start over (with the few games that actually are this trope, such as Net Hack and Scribble Nauts), or just give up about it and dump it in Sugar Wiki.

Number 1 sounds like Unexpectedly Realistic Gameplay.

We also already have Combinatorial Explosion

Spark 9: The trope's actually not what you say it's about. It's actually about relatively obscure actions the players do being accounted for by the developer and having them program in a response accordingly. You probably just only read the first paragraph and mistook what the trope's really about.

Anyway, the reason why people (like me, admittedly) use this for "paying attention to detail" as well as for its intended use is because a name "Developers think of everything" doesn't make it obvious what the trope's really about.

Therefore, I suggest we'd either expand it (while removing blatant examples of "being standard to the gender" like what Spark 9 said {alongside stuff that aren't "attention to detail" like those horde battles in Pokémon X and Y [which's more Gameplay and Story Integration than this trope] and the Arc Weilding of Uplink and Darwinia) as well as making Combinatorial Explosion a subtrope) or make a new trope related to what it's been misused for, then move the examples that are misuse over to that trope.

edited 24th Nov '14 2:13:53 PM by KarjamP

I'd be curious to see a Wick Check on this as to whether there's all that much misuse in the wicks; it's definitely a poor title, though not changeable at this point.

I don't like expanding the definition to fit use here or spinning off a new trope; the trope to me is "the developers put something in here that you should never see and can't see without blatant exploits, incredible luck, or serious determination," but the misuse isn't consistent enough to suggest a missing trope to me, most things are just misplaced. It just needs a clean-up to get back to definition.

Which, in part, is caused by the trope's name.

I think it's possible there's a Missing Supertrope.

I have an idea: Why not perform a trope transplant and make a new trope under the old title dealing with what everyone thinks this trope is?

The official rules says we can't get rid of the old trope name if there's too much wicks to it, not we can't move or rename the trope and do something with the old name so that it's not unused.

36000 inbounds are a lot of inbounds that will be pointing to a different trope. And I have no idea where to find the manpower to move 1400+ wicks.

Could certainly use a thorough scrubbing from examples that are just logical to include, or that follow naturally from the code.

Not sure the name's a problem, though, since it seems more restrictive than the trope to me, and the problem is the opposite.

Removing all examples is needlessly excessive. There's a trope here, with some good examples.

The Sugar Wiki is not a dumping ground for what we don't want to deal with.

There are basically two ideas floating around.

• A game where it is designed from the start to be as immersive and interactive as possible, such that players are continually amazed at what they are able to do. Scribblenauts and Minecraft come to mind.
• A game that seems fairly simple and straightforward, but anticipates players Sequence Breaking or otherwise exploring areas outside of their set parameters, rewarding them with an Easter Egg. Halo is one of the kings of this.

Both ideas are perfectly valid, the question is whether they should be the same trope or split up.

Note that the Trope Namer and Trope Codifier (i.e. Net Hack) is the former. Also, I see several other definitions in this thread so far.

Based upon what says, I think that the true problem may as well be that the trope's confusing enough to have multiple definitions.

I think this's the reason why some stuff which technically don't count as examples (like Uplink and Darwinia, those horde battles in Pokemon X and Y) were added in the first place.

If we don't do a trope transplant of the old definition and make The Dev Team Thinks of Everything a supertrope to cover all these interpretations, perhaps we should rewrite the trope description as to be more clearer.

edited 24th Nov '14 3:37:30 PM by KarjamP

I've noticed this before as well. The Mass Effect subpage was filled with a lot of examples that didn't fit (i.e. "all your save variables are tracked"). Good to know, and that's a key part of the game, but doesn't fit with the "designers expected you would try something that's contrary to sense or reason" mentality.

The Grand Theft Auto page is also filled with incorrect examples/gushing from people who decided to port over a list of "100 things you might not know you can do in GTA V" (most of them are things that aren't examples, and you can run across them randomly). I wanted to clean it out before, but I'd rather not have to deal with a bunch of ardent fanboys.

edited 24th Nov '14 5:33:07 PM by crazyrabbits

I think all examples fall under the two I brought up, anything further is just Audience Reaction and not really a trope. There is a difference between "developers anticipate any and all player choices" and "Individual player caught by surprise with what the developer offered as content." The two types I listed cover the type of game vs. how they expect players to act in the game. One is almost its own genre now, the other is almost purely Easter Egg-centric.

Mass Effect is a little of both types, mostly because the level of continuity with player choice between games is unprecedented even for RPG's.

I think this article's description should be rewritten to actually make it more clearer on what it's about as to avoid misuse.

We should also consider renaming the trope while having The Dev Team Thinks of Everything as a redirect as I suspect that the name itself attracts the gushing (as in, "I'm amazed at this feature included in the game! The dev team really did thought of everything!")

Or it just needs a bit more emphasis on the "everything" part. It's not The Dev Team Thought Of This One Thing That I Didnt Expect Them To after all, so the misuse does not directly come from the name.

Quote from darksilverhawk in this thread:

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=1416814816010870600&page=1#7

Unless everyone else disagrees with him about this (for which I do not know), we may need to discuss other solutions as well.

edited 25th Nov '14 9:57:45 AM by KarjamP

I think we need figure out exactly what the working definition should be and clean the examples to fit. I'm not crazy about expanding it but I acknowledge that it's not an terrible idea seeing current use vs definition vs title.

There definitely might be a Missing Supertrope here that encompasses this, Easter Egg, and Combinatorial Explosion, I'm just not sure what exactly it would be. There's certainly a lot of overlap (and it sometimes might be hard to tell the difference between The Dev Team Thinks of Everything and Easter Egg).

I agree. The various types of usage I've seen for the trope are:

1) completing a task before the game asks you to

2) going back to talk to someone/visiting a place, despite having no reason to do so at that point in the story

3) Sequence Breaking and being rewarded for it

4) unique conversations/content for equipping certain items

5) acknowledgement of different statuses for a downed character (unconscious or dead)

6) unique lighting/sound effects (see the Animal Crossing subpage)

7) killing a plot-important character before their role is fulfilled changes content

8) unique content/dialogue for picking certain names (offensive or the same as another character's) in the character creator

9) Take a Third Option at a point where the game led you to believe you only had two options

10) unique content for triggering cheats or exploits

11) sticking around to hear more NPC dialogue, long past the point you should have moved on

12) special error messages

13) Shown Their Work (special attention paid to settings, items, character quirks)

14) doing something after you're specifically told not to do

15) Easter Eggs

16) content added if a player gets unintentionally stuck

17) moments that are a Violation of Common Sense (for instance, assassinating the Enclave President in the original Fallout by healing him with Super Stimpacks)

18) NPC's reacting to a wide assortment of unique circumstances

19) old save bonuses

20) NPC's having different dialogue based on where the player is at that point in the story

21) different content based on the player's class/background/skills

How we can amalgamate all that, I don't know yet.

edited 25th Nov '14 11:04:59 AM by crazyrabbits

Combinatorial Explosion also has issues.

Actually, that page is a Useful Notes page, not a trope: it points out that a game with lots of objects and lots of hotspots will have LOTS of possible combinations (which is straightforward math, after all). Then it lists an arbitrary selection of games that fail to deal with this explosion in a variety of ways (the examples on that page range from Pixel Hunt to Unwinnable by Design to You Can't Get Ye Flask).

So anyway. By its original definition as given by Trope Namer and Trope Codifier Net Hack, The Dev Team Thinks of Everything means that the game has a response (often an effect, not just a message) for basically everything you can try. Yes, "everything" means ''"Everything""'.

Example? Well, Net Hack has a cockatrice, a traditional monster that can turn enemies to stone. That's nothing special, plenty of games have petrifying monsters. What sets Nethack apart is that it also has game effects for (1) protecting yourself by shapeshifting into a stone golem, (2) tripping over the cockatrice corpse while blinded, (3) wielding the cockatrice as a weapon against your enemies, (4) falling down stairs while wielding a cockatrice and accidentally hitting yourself, (5) throwing it upwards so that it lands on you, and even (6) shapeshifting yourself into a cockatrice and laying eggs which you can use as a weapon. Just to show how far this trope can go, and that it really isn't something simple as "ooooh there's a sprite for standing on a ledge".

Most of what you list there falls under other tropes.

^^^ That's getting caught up in the specific examples and ignoring the trope behind it. It's meant to be open ended because the trope is about putting in unexpected content. If the content was expected it would be its own trope.

I think it should be difficult or take a lot of work to get to the point where you actually notice the trope. Anything that falls under normal gameplay, which includes mistakes, varying (non-extreme) playstyles, and reponses to intended actions, would not be The Dev Team Thinks of Everything.

If you sequence break where you have to use special techniques or where the situation requires more skill than what you need to beat the game, and then get to the point where something unique happens, then it would fit. However, if you just ignore a plot-event and wander around, it might technically be sequence breaking, but it's also something that can be expected to be done. Not this trope.

If you try a combination of items (or similar) that you wouldn't get without backtracking where backtracking isn't normally done and serves no purpose, and there's a special response, then it fits. On the other hand, if it's a game where backtracking is normal, an open world, or where there's a meaningful purpose to it, it's an expected event.

Trying every single combination of items and skills you can think of and finding a coded response for each one, no matter how out there, then it fits (probably). Not if you just find one combination you think seems unusual and there's a response.

In short, do you have to go significantly out of your way to find it?

That's a decent start. I would like to add "if you cannot think of at least five examples of how a game fits this trope, then it doesn't".

E.g. if there's one convoluted sequence break that gives a special response, then that's simply an Easter Egg. If every sequence you can think of gives a special response, then the Dev Team really Thinks Of Everything.