Broken games with no maximum number caps

[AlexanderPeregrine]

This is going to take some explanation, but not too much. Most well-designed games have what is known as a difficulty curve that goes hand-in-hand with the player's skills and equipment. These games typically have an upper limit on stats such as health, ammo, speed, damage, etc.

What I'm looking for are games that don't. The games where you can level up forever, do billions of damage when the last boss only has 50,000 HP, break the animation system by attacking 1500 times a second, and can bring so many soldiers onto the battlefield that it almost resembles a Lovecraftian monster and the framerate can be measured in hours. These are the games that have the hilariously weird glitches and exploits because nobody wondered if the engine could support such massive numbers. Having no upper limit might just be the very definition of a "broken game" because they usually end up crashing.

At the moment, the only games I've played with this issue have been amateur Flash games and custom mods. Most of my inspiration for this thread comes from this awful shooting gallery called Masters of Monsters: Disciples of Gaia [http://www.kongregate.com/games/noanoa/elona-shooter] a long time ago that sounds like it has this issue. Also, there's the infamous Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing and how it has no cap on its reverse:

Spoiler: 190 billion miles per hour

What I'm looking for are other games with no clear end point. Are there any professional studio releases in the past decade with this issue? Do you know of any interesting videos demonstrating games breaking because of this? Also, games that have a nominal maximum that can be bypassed through exploits also make for entertaining exploration.

 

[Vegosiux]

Oh, there was that alchemy abuse thing in Morrowind where you could make restoration potions that would restore your full health pool ten times over every second, for a full real-time day. And make you go so fast you ended up in Hla Oad when you tapped the forward key in Seyda Neen. If you were lucky. If you weren't, your game simply crashed.

 

[DoPo]

Hmm, I don't think there is a game with truly no max cap - HP, damage, etc. numbers must be held somewhere in memory and represented somehow and I don't think there is a game that has made an unlimited int type. Well, still, the largest amound would be some sort of unsigned int which can still be a VERY LARGE number, I'm talking like 2^64 large, which is A LOT. It's also rare a game would use that, more often there is a much smaller actual limit.

At any rate...would "cheating" count? I recall some Flash games where you could actually break the numbers, either they would "loop around" and instead of leaving you at 0 gold, you might end up with the highest amount of gold the game can represent (which may very well be never attainable with normal means) or you could actually break the number, meaning you turn your gold into NaN[footnote]Not a Number - a special value that...well, it does what you think - signifies that what should be a number doesn't appear to be one - it could be because somebody typed a word instead of numbers or it could just break by itself[/footnote] - this leads to some bizarre behaviour. Namely, you'd either be able to afford everything or nothing. Sometimes it's both! And NaN damage might kill absolutely everything in one hit, for example.

You don't even need to do anything special with some Flash games, they are just that bad they break by themselves. However, I can't actually recall any at the moment. I know I've played a few of them but I can't remember names.

Well, aside from that, there was the alchemy in Morrowind, as mentioned. There was also enchanting. You could make stupidly powerful enchantments that are permanent to boot - 100pt Sanctuary (so, 100% evasion), also 100% Magic Reflection/Absorption (no spell will hit you, either), 100% Chameleon (unbreakable invisibility at all times), constant health regeneration, enhanced attributes/skills and so on. Heck, you're not restricted on only one of these, either. And permanent enchantments are also ridiculously easy - you just need a grand soul - and you can just summon a creature with one and kill it yourself, then make it into an enchantment straight after.

But enchantments could also be just spells you cast from an object (as opposed to wave hands and use Magicka). This means that you can easily never, ever run out of juice to power the spells, as normal mages had it hard - limited Magicka pool, also chance to fail the casting (and waste the cost) at lower levels. Enchanting has none of those - you can easily never run out of casts, also - the casting never fails. Add to that the fact that there is no delay between using items, and you can do 10 damage as fast as you can click. Which beats any spell you could make to the dust.

Not that magic is weak, mind you - straight up damage is just one of the things you can do. It's also easy to make an effect of some sort that damages Strength. Reduce an enemy's strength to 0 and they cannot move at all. Permanently. It's better than paralyse and burden, since it works 100% of the time and it lasts infinitely. Destroy somebody's intelligence, and they wouldn't be able to cast spells.

Then there are the attributes. During the MQ, you contact a disease that reduces your Personality (and, I think Intelligence) but boosts Strength and Endurance. Every day. So you could just wait for however long you want, since it doesn't kill you, then cure it, then restore your attributes. You get the lost ones back to normal, the boosted just stay high forever.

And money is no issue at all in Morrowind. You can walk around with millions in your pockets, because you can't actually spend all of them. With money, you can just go and train all the skills you want. You suck at magic? Not any more. How about sword fighting? Yup, that's covered now.

The game is full of these exploits. Not cheesing the game is harder than doing it, actually.

 

[Kopikatsu]

Disgaea, especially Thursday. Thursday can steal stats from enemies indefinitely, which makes him the only character without a hard cap. (Other characters can get super extremely ridiculously high stats, but they do technically have a limit with max proficiencies + level 189,999)

 

[hazabaza1]

Disgaea, especially Thursday. Thursday can steal stats from enemies indefinitely, which makes him the only character without a hard cap. (Other characters can get super extremely ridiculously high stats, but they do technically have a limit with max proficiencies + level 189,999)

This.
Disgaea has ridiculous stat caps.

 

[Comocat]

In the original Mario brothers there was a trick where you could bounce on a turtle and get infinite lives. Once you hit a certain threshold of lives, rather than having a number like 999 lives, the number of lives got converted into weird characters and symbols.

 

[aguspal]

I think I have played some of those kind of games, but NONE that actually managed to broke the game in a weird way, at least that I can remember...

 

[frobalt]

Hmm, I don't think there is a game with truly no max cap - HP, damage, etc. numbers must be held somewhere in memory and represented somehow and I don't think there is a game that has made an unlimited int type. Well, still, the largest amound would be some sort of unsigned int which can still be a VERY LARGE number, I'm talking like 2^64 large, which is A LOT. It's also rare a game would use that, more often there is a much smaller actual limit.

What the OP meant is no limit imposed by the developer. Borderlands 2 is a good example, as you can only get to Level 50, max, but can potentially get unlimited "badass" ranks.

I wonder what the highest badass rank on BL2 currently is, and how high you can get stats before it's pointless raising them higher, after all, certain stats would be pointless raising higher (Such as reload speed and element effect chance).

The small print to this is that the ranks are gained by doing challenges, and you have a limited amount per character, so would have to have multiple characters to improve it to significant numbers.


Edit: For those unfamiliar with the Badass system, check out the BL2 wiki [http://borderlands.wikia.com/wiki/Badass_Rank]


For the TL;DR version:

When you complete a challenge on your character you gain badass ranks. After gaining a certain amount of ranks you'll get a badass token, which you can use to permanently boost a random selection of stats - You get to choose between 5 of the 14 stats. As you can imagine, the more tokens you've earned the more ranks it takes to unlock more.

Also, the % it increases a stat by decreases the more you increase that stat, so it would take a LONG time to get 1 stat fully upgraded.

These bonuses are account based, though.