Feature: S-S-Sequence Breaker!

Published November 24, 2015

I don’t know about you, but I enjoy a good long game. I’m a fan of almost all RPG’s and love investing hours into a story and watching it play out. However, and this is a pretty big however, there exists a whole other side to gaming. The side of the speed runners and the exploiters… the world of Sequence Breaking. Skipping entire swathes of gameplay or acquiring late game items almost immediately in order to power through the early stages. Whether you view this as fair means or foul, there are some games that are so well known for these that they’ve become almost synonymous with the term. Sequence Breaking exists in a huge amount of games, from Super Mario Bros and Metroid Prime to Halo Reach and Portal. While I’m not going to attempt to list them all here, I will bring up a few of the instances I have personally observed/used. But I’ll also be fulfilling my own narcissistic need to spout drivel and hope someone somewhere reads it (Notice me, Senpai!)

The absolute earliest example of sequence breaking that I am aware of is in the original Super Mario Bros, and is probably the most famous of all. The ‘Minus World’ warp glitch allowed players to warp from world 1-2 to world 5-1, instead of worlds 2-1, 3-1 or 4-1. There is also a way to warp straight to world 36-1, but that just leaves you in a glitched underwater world which you can never leave. So it doesn’t really qualify as you just have to stay there until you die.

I don’t think I know anyone who played Super Mario Bros who didn’t use the glitch, and if you saw someone playing and they didn’t use it then they were clearly a noob.

Another very well known sequence breaker was in Fallout 2, you could proceed directly south to Navarro (After a quick stop at San Francisco) and find yourself a sexy set of Enclave Mk2 power armour. I ended up doing this one myself after finishing the game legitimately a few times, and nearly lost my mind with excitement at the time. But now that I look back on it, although I had a blast trotting around the wasteland with low end weapons and beastly armour, if I had used this method on my first play-through wouldn’t I just hamper my own enjoyment of the overall Fallout experience? We’re supposed to struggle a bit at the beginning of games, that’s what makes finding the high level items so worthwhile later on. It’s a sense of achievement that can’t be matched by skipping straight past the difficult part and just reaping the benefits. Getting access to late game items early is amusing, but can also wreck a game.

The perfect example of this is my first foray into the world of Borderlands on xbox360 way back in 2009. I loved it, had a blast playing co-op with some mates and was really invested in the story. Until someone gave me a gun to use, which was hacked and did something like 98237965874356378425614785 damage per shot. So you can one shot The Destroyer. The End Boss. The culmination of all those hours of gaming reduced to a single bang and a pop. The game instantly became boring, because without challenge where is the thrill of survival? Finally beating that section you’ve been stuck on is one of my favourite gaming experiences, and removing that seems like such a shame. I, of course, merely dropped the hacked weapon and carried on. But it had broken the immersion for me already and nothing I did could take me back to that same feeling I had beforehand. Sad Panda.

The sequence breaking topic came up recently in the GeekNodeZA skype group (you will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy), when our fearless leader NiteFenix mentioned the Farcry 4 method of completing the game with 0 effort at all. One of the most interesting facts about this method is that it is entirely planned by the Devs, and more of an easter egg than an exploit. So how do you finish the game without going through all of the actual game? Just wait at the Crab Rangoon table when Pagan Min leaves to torture the ‘texting terrorist’ and after 15 minutes he will come back and fly you to reunite your mother’s ashes with those of his/her (?) daughter, then take you off to shoot some guns. Roll credits, blast ‘The Clash – Should I Stay or Should I Go’, hey presto. Game Over man, Game Over.

Now this is where my interest was piqued. This is not a glitch or an exploit, as I’ve stated, but an intentional feature put there by the developers and I love it. It adds another facet to the game that would otherwise be lacking, and something I’ve spoken about extensively. The option to just go ahead and NOT fight the bad guy. We’re constantly pushed down a linear path of goodness by games, even if you’re playing Neverwinter Nights and want to be chaotic evil, you still end up doing good along the way in the overarching story. Which, as a naturally contrary person, pisses me off. I want to try being the bad guy for once, and even if this particular example just borrows from the adage “all it takes for evil to flourish is for good men to do nothing”, it still offers a glimpse into a more realistic world behind the gameplay. How many of us would truly step up in that situation? I think I speak honestly when I say that very few of us would become the heroic figure we end up portraying if we actually had to make the choices and suffer the consequences in real life.T

hat being said not all Sequence Breaking conjures up questions of morality in my mind, at least not beyond the whole “Is this cheating?” question that is so hard to answer. Take the famous/infamous Deus Ex gas grenade method for example, whereby you can have guards open doors for you that you wouldn’t other wise be able to access. Despite prompting the guard to say “I heard you snuck past everyone, pretty smart” and adding a veneer of legitimacy to the whole thing it still dwells in a grey area when it comes to gaming morality. Is it cheating, or intelligent use of the tools you have available? Deus Ex is a game that encourages you to use your wits and stealth to evade/take down a veritable host of enemies, so surely this is just a continuation of that theme, right? RIGHT? Isn’t an exploit just a smarter way of doing something?

What do you think? Is Sequence Breaking a legitimate game tactic, or a cheat? What Sequence Breaking instances have you seen/used yourself and do you feel it detracted from the overall game experience? Let me know in the comment section below, first person to answer gets a cookie that I totally didn’t find at the back of a cupboard in my kitchen. Promise.

Article Tags: Exploit · Gaming · Glitch · Sequence Breaking · Video Games

Article Categories: Games