RPGs with game-breaking exploits

[Mr. Magniloquent]

I can't believe nobody has mentioned item duplicating in Diablo 1. You set an item in the ground and direct your character to walk over to it and pick it up. At the exact moment the character picks it, you select a potion from your belt. The potion will become a clone of the item on the ground.

Infinity gold. Clone spell books for massive power advancement. Clone the quest golden potion that gives you bonus stat points. Clone charged items like Staff of the Apocalypse. Deplete them and discard. Absolutely will defeat all game difficulty.

 

[Iucounu]

Stalker Clear Sky may not qualify as a RPG, but it does offer many serious exploits.

One of the funniest things I did was ignoring the very first mission (investigating the watch tower), instead I escaped to the Fishing Hamlet. With preparations and practice you can just barely make it to safety there before the emission strikes, and afterwards you have broken the mission and is free from the Clear Sky faction! NPCs still exist in the game world, but without doing much.

None of the normal level changers worked, but I already knew from other players that you could sneak out of the playing area by hugging a fence up a slippery slope close to Doc's Cave. From there I went clockwise around the playing area (while doing frequent saves, and giving wide berth to hidden level changers that would send me back inside the playing area) until I reached a group of hidden level changers on the East side, that are possibly used by the game for quick travelling. One of these level changers sent me straight to the far side of the Limansk river in Red Forest, and from there I somehow managed to reach another invisible group of level changers in Yantar (just outside the level changer to Red Forest, reachable by going counter-clockwise around the factory). From where I could finally quick travel almost anywhere I wanted.

When I got tired of all this I went back to the Swamps, and found a way to the Clear Sky base from the South-West where I could finally get into the base and accept Lebedev's offer to join the faction. Not sure if the game actually worked after that though, at least it didn't the second time I tried all this, but it was still a fun experiment after playing the game "normally" over a dozen times.

 

[Kev Inkline]

It’s not as cool as some of the stuff posted in here but I think it still counts. There’s a part in vampire the masquerade bloodlines where you need to fight/run away from a werewolf with is meant to be one of the hardest fights in the game. However there’s a nearby building you can go into that the warewolf is too big to fit into so he just stands at the entrance making him a easy kill.

Sounds like it is the player being smart. Or at least should be. In another CRPG make it not a simple door but some tight passage, hard to spot either by a skill check or by player, that your character can access only with high DEX/AGI or acrobatics skill. A big monster gets stuck there, profit. A good crpg situation where you can use both non combat skills and player's smarts to defeat a strong(er) oponent.

I just watched this yesterday:

 

[MerchantKing]

If it doesn't have a game breaking exploit, can we even still call it an rpg?

B-but think about the balance! Feelings of dominated npcs! No man should enjoy all that ~power~. You will be balanced and enjoy your Daedric equipped bandits throughout the land.

You're right. From now on I'm only going to use the 32 pointbuy option and use the stats 12, 14, 14, 14, 14, 12 and take a different class each level so my character can never be too powerful.

 

[laclongquan]

Ultima 6 has a rudimentary trading system where some goods are bought and sold at variable prices at different shops.

The balance of this system wasn't thought out too well. You can simply buy cloth at the clothmaker in Britain, walk across the street to the tailor, and sell the cloth for a profit of 5 gold per unit.

Might and magic series, specifically 8, has a system of this. each town has one or two local specialty goods. Buy these and sell at certain towns get premium prices.
It' s not game breaking because by the time you found some really profitable destination towns, you would be strong enough to not need these piddly amount of trade money.
This feature get revisited in NWN2 Storm of Zehyr, and again, they make it nonexploitable and it's a boring feature~

 

[cpmartins]

You can call it tactics, but I claim it exploit: knowing where your enemies are hidden in fog of war in Infinity Engine games, than spamming Stinking clouds, Webs, Cloudkill and Fire balls (in that order as the first two don't hurt anyone, not turning red circled fckrs hostile to pursue you)

That's called artillery, and it's a weapons system.

 

[laclongquan]

Fallout's steal system. in F1/2 you can steal for xp, and consecutive steal success reward better xp. So a good thief can do this steal on low level target with bottlecaps (easiest to not raise suspicion) with a series of tricks like behind target back, dose them with -per alcohols. You could raise as much level as you want as long as you not get bored of this repetitive action.

 

[Reggin Backward]

Speaking of item duplication, has anyone mentioned Titan Quest dupe trick in multiplayer? It is both hilarious and risky at the same time because you have to trust the other player if it fails.

So it goes something like you have an item that you need to duplicate so you invite another player to exchange. When the exchange tab opens, you put the item and click "accept" BUT the other player has to click "accept" too!
Therefore the trick is to count to 3 chat and at the last time, the player with the item has to click "cancel" while the other player clicks "confirm", simultaneously.

Of course with the lag it's tricky to get the duplicated item on the first try. So the procedure has to be done again and sometimes the other player has your original item. That's the trust part I was mentioning : you had to pray to Zeus the guy was not a scumbag, logging off with your item. It never happened to me personally and I never did it to other players, back then the multiplayer community was small and reputation followed. We knew the bad ones, who not to trust.. Fun times really.

I have no idea if this was ever fixed in later installments (Immortal Throne expansion and Ragnarok) because I only played multi on the og version of the game.

 

[kangaxx]

There used to be an exploit in the Vandenburg level of Deus Ex where you could shoot the cliff/rock at the back end of the map in a specific spot and it would end it straight away. I have absolutely no idea how this was possible though.

 

[Silverfish]

Wouldn't be surprised if it got patched out, but the release version of Outer Worlds had a hilariously busted oversight wherein weapons equipped to party members didn't degrade over time and didn't consume ammo, so you could take heavy weapons like miniguns or grenade launchers that had drawbacks when you used them, give them to your drones and kick back and watch the game play itself.

 

[laclongquan]

Fallout 1/2 has this companion-barter system where they take encumberance/carryweight into account. But if you steal companion and put items into their inventory the CW factor is ignore, and if you get caught there's no penalty.

So once you have a companion capable of carrying, like Sulik at Klamath or Vic at the Den, your CW issue is over~

 

[Jack Of Owls]

I recall being able to jump up on a short ledge or bookcase and put absolutely minimal effort into killing the main villain in Night of the Raven, the expansion for Gothic 2.

The 2 second end-game boss fight in Might and Magic VI felt very broken.

 

[welly321]

In might and magic 7, there was a dragon at the beginning y ou could kill using a wand of fireballs. Once you killed this dragon, you could do the save scum, duplicate corpse exploit where about 1 in 20 times you loot the corpse, it would let you loot it and still leave the corpse, allowing you to loot it again. So with enough time, you could get tons of artifacts at the very beginning.

 

[Aemar]

The looting - save scumming combo is widely available in 6 as well.