How Smart should the AI be?

The topic of how smart enemy mobs should be is always interesting to discuss. If the AI are too stupid the game becomes boring, but make them too smart and the game becomes too frustrating to bother with. Anyone who has played WoW knows how annoying it is to fight Murlocs, mostly because they are much smarter than most other enemies. When you attack them they call allies to help, when they are on low health they run away from you, and healing-capable Murlocs will heal their allies. These are traits you don't find in most other WoW mobs.

Along with this we need to consider what kinds of abilities to give the enemy mobs. Should they have CC or healing abilities? I believe if you are going to add such abilities into the game you should also give players ways to counter them. If the enemy mobs have CC you should be able to avoid it in some way. If the enemy mobs have a healing ability there should be a way to interrupt it.

So, how smart do you want the enemy AI to be? What traits do you want them to show while fighting?

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Nagash

Behague wrote: »

When I first played Age of Empires II, I turned the AI difficulty to 11 and got thoroughly pummeled. I hope its not that difficult unless I bring friends.

your weakness discuses me

Wandering Mist

Nagash wrote: »

Behague wrote: »

When I first played Age of Empires II, I turned the AI difficulty to 11 and got thoroughly pummeled. I hope its not that difficult unless I bring friends.

your weakness discuses me

It disgusted you so much you forgot how to spell the word :P

Behague

Nagash wrote: »

Behague wrote: »

When I first played Age of Empires II, I turned the AI difficulty to 11 and got thoroughly pummeled. I hope its not that difficult unless I bring friends.

your weakness discuses me

Sure taught 11 year old self not to mess with the AI again

Atama

Wandering Mist wrote: »

Nagash wrote: »

Behague wrote: »

When I first played Age of Empires II, I turned the AI difficulty to 11 and got thoroughly pummeled. I hope its not that difficult unless I bring friends.

your weakness discuses me

It disgusted you so much you forgot how to spell the word :P

It’s hard to type with a skeletal hand.

You try typing by poking at a keyboard with chopsticks and see how many typos you have.

voidshadow

Botw level mob AI is the bar that i've set even though it is a single player game. And yeah as someone mentioned above, difficulty increase shouldnt be a numbers increase. I love playing fire emblem but my main gripe with the difficulty is it tends to raise enemy stats and doesnt do much for enemy AI.

WizardTim

Wandering Mist wrote: »

The topic of how smart enemy mobs should be is always interesting to discuss. If the AI are too stupid the game becomes boring, but make them too smart and the game becomes too frustrating to bother with. Anyone who has played WoW knows how annoying it is to fight Murlocs, mostly because they are much smarter than most other enemies. When you attack them they call allies to help, when they are on low health they run away from you, and healing-capable Murlocs will heal their allies. These are traits you don't find in most other WoW mobs.

Along with this we need to consider what kinds of abilities to give the enemy mobs. Should they have CC or healing abilities? I believe if you are going to add such abilities into the game you should also give players ways to counter them. If the enemy mobs have CC you should be able to avoid it in some way. If the enemy mobs have a healing ability there should be a way to interrupt it.

So, how smart do you want the enemy AI to be? What traits do you want them to show while fighting?

I want to see a variety of levels of intellect. Animals shouldn't just attack based on predator/prey, most animals would rather avoid conflict that could injure them, and only attack when threatened or when protecting their young. If a predator is actively hunting you, it should avoid charging at your face and instead stalk you (even using stealth skills) and attack from behind.

Goblins and other smaller weaker mobs should be drastically scaled down in individual strength, but absolutely swarm you. As in if you injure one with an arrow, it shouts and calls all it's buddies to arms. Those buddies might raise further alarms in the area and the rest of the armed goblins would be at increased levels of alertness and ready to attack in mass if the first wave fails to kill you.

Up to humanoid levels, PvE encounters should depend more on individual power, using archetypes and ranging their abilities based on their level (but not secondary archetypes and augments, heroes have to be heroic somehow after all). They should be hard encounters because of organization. Healers, tanks, and DPS all working together to keep you locked in conflict just as you would operate in.

A thing that's always annoyed me about PvE encounters was the conveniently small and tight aggro ranges. You could vary those ranges based on the encounter you want to develop. Goblins being highly aggressive or defensive around their territory would attack you as soon as they see you. Humanoids and animals might prefer to avoid you or only attack you if you approach whatever operation they're running and looking to defend.

If each PvE encounter requires some level of understanding to defeat it quickly, that would actually be awesome. If I can treat goblin hunting exactly the same as bandit hunting, what's the point of having two different creature types to begin with? Save yourself the animation time and just make bandits the only thing we ever encounter. PvE should be a lot more diverse then it has been. And yes, that means making it way more challenging than people are use to. I should feel a strong need to find a group to level with rather then try to run out and solo everything. Social interaction is what makes MMOs MMOs after all.

consultant

Think AI should be progressive and a little random. progresseive as in more intelligent as more dificult content becomes available. Random as in sometimes basic AIs like wolves and bears pull a fast one and do something smart more for variety to break up the boredome of grinding out out 50 wolves or bears for whatever reason. So AI should be smart enought to make you pay attention but not generally smart enought to make you wipe a lot unless it is hard cantent like 40 man raids and challenge dungeouns in those cases it is ok.

But if there was option to have advanced bots and monsters then that would be great way to cater to people that like those things. Somthing like Ironman mode or having Irionman toon. Really would recommend different mode like Apoc mode. (Apocalyptic Mode) Just not for every body think somehting like this would be easy to implement. I know what the iron man challenge is in wow not suggestion that exact challenge. Thinking Intrepid could come up with an Apoc Mode that would be fun and challenging for players that like those type of things definitely not for every body.

But in general would like AI difficulty set to moderate with option to do more difficult content. Mainly for phsycological reasons. When you do difficult content puts you under pressure and not every one likes those type of settings. At moderately difficulty in general people will be having fun with out having the game be too easy.

To put in terms of pvp rated pvp at higher rating is like zero tolerance for mistakes. If you do make a mistake then as soon as match ends people will be asking why
Like why did you not make that interupt. and so on.

While non rated pvp content were you can try different set ups and tactics well not so much pressure more relaxed so more fun.

Both are FUN for me just different type of fun. So like in easy content a good player would just be mowing over everything having fun. Medium diffuculty content still killing things but have to be more care ful. Hard mode well have to be careful or you will die.

All three them are fun just high pressure no mistakes type of content not for every body all the time.

Pesonally I like difficult content and I am a pvper but sometimes my mind just wants to relax a bit and have no pressure fun. So recommend moderate difficulty for AI and if persons wnats to be challenged they can go and get that challenge by seeking out different content in pve and pvp.

Really forcing one difficulty rating on the entire players base is a design mistake in my opinion. Mainly because person may wnat to do easy content vs hard content just because they feel like it nothing to do with skill. Plus Game should cater to players of different skill levels.

But maybe you are refering to the fact that in some games AI for entire game is really basic and difficulty is dtermined by how much damage and hit points they have.

Personally I liked the AI in X-com Ufo enemy Unknown. You could pretty much figure out what they were going to do but sometimes they pulled a fast one or really smart move so you had to pay attention. So lets say they did not do anything unusual or smart for one game then you basically got lucky. So really it is not the difficulty it is that the AI is not static and repetative. But Jeff said there were coding issues with super smart AI. In MMO there are hundreds of mobs and monsters soo...

But I did present a post were we could at least get random actions from mobs just for variety that required little coding.

Kasel

I just care about the realism aspect, so I really really hope that many of the mobs types like Bears for example, will run away when low on health. What would be even cooler is if size would scare them, so for example if they come close and I'm a summoner, I'd just scare it off by summoning a much larger creature than that Bear (if it's lower level than you, to balance this thing out of course) or if you're a giant Orc who's also higher level than the Bear, he'd just run away.

Things like that i'd appreciate the hell out of.

HeronMarkedSword

Best example I could think of is the AI generator for mob spawns (time of spawn rate | rarity of spawn(s) | randomness of monsters / mobs | inclusive / exclusive to PCs (whether or not they step on the spawn zone) | dependent upon PC(s) present - level(s), items of power, number in party, number without party, PC and/or NPC.

Some spawns have algorithms / timers as well. Not exactly sure how Unreal does this but you combine 10,000 players on one map/server + spawns that are entirely dependent on those PCs and you have one crazy zoo.

consultant

AI should be smart enough to keep game interesting and enough to make the player pay attention and still have the game be fun.

Wandering Mist

consultant wrote: »

AI should be smart enough to keep game interesting and enough to make the player pay attention and still have the game be fun.

Agreed. Unfortunately that is easier said than done.

Damokles

Clever enough, that we can use the sentence: "Clever girl..."

fiasco79

I suppose it would depend on UE4.

Noaani

fiasco79 wrote: »

I suppose it would depend on UE4.

Unlikely.

Intrepid are either heavily editing or completely rewriting large amounts of UE4, and I would think the AI would be one of the first ones they made the decision to do.

Dygz

Typically programmers have to make AI dumb enough to be killable by players.
We really want the AI to behave more life-like. It's not so much about the AI being "smarter".

I wish we could get AI similar to what was described for StoryBricks: Emergent AI.

Wandering Mist

A thing that's always annoyed me about PvE encounters was the conveniently small and tight aggro ranges. You could vary those ranges based on the encounter you want to develop. Goblins being highly aggressive or defensive around their territory would attack you as soon as they see you. Humanoids and animals might prefer to avoid you or only attack you if you approach whatever operation they're running and looking to defend.

I just want to go back to this point from @wolfwood82

I think one of the reasons why devs make aggro ranges so small and AI behaviour so small is that they realise not everyone is going to be in a group all the time. If you only have groups of mobs that all attack together it will be impossible for solo players to fight them unless they are really overleveled. Now I know what some of you will say, that the whole point of playing an mmorpg is to play with other people as part of a group. I totally get that but sometimes you want to just go solo for a bit. Playing GW2 there are days where I just want to play by myself, to put on some relaxing music and go out farming alone. If all the world is covered in packs of mobs that I can't deal with solo I can't do that, and that would be a huge shame.

To me, there are 2 solutions to this while still keeping intelligent AI. The first would be to have areas which can be soloed due to enemy placement. Instead of having 5-6 mobs in close proximity you have 1-2 mobs instead. The second would be to provide AI companions that you could take along in place of other players. Guildwars had this and it worked pretty well where you could fill up your party with AI companions and still get stuff done (you couldn't solo anything in Guildwars outside of a couple of very specific builds/situations).

Dygz

That seems to be about simplicity rather than "intelligence".
StoryBricks design, specifically, and emergent AI, in general, call for a more complex range of behaviors based on NPC response to gender, race, class, faction, and actions players have taken in the world - rather than just relying on aggro range and kos.

Also, playing in a group is not the whole point of MMORPGs. The point of MMORPGs is to play in a world populated with masses of players. It's about playing alongside other players, not necessarily being grouped. Especially, not necessarily being grouped for combat.
Group combat is just one aspect of MMORPGs. A major aspect, sure. Especially since combat has been the simplest reaction to design for - as opposed to designing for Charisma/Diplomacy skills.
Ashes design adds Node progression as another avenue for masses of players to play alongside each other without being grouped for combat.

Dave Mark worked on emergent AI for Guild Wars 2 - in addition to EQNext.

xlangatangx

Good topic and been enjoying the discussions in here.

I like the idea of realistic. If content becomes difficult because of that, then even better IMO. I don't want to be able to farm every mob solo. If I see a goblin village and run in expecting to pull one at a time, slay it, then repeat until all the goblins are dead, then that wouldn't feel like a goblin village. It might LOOK like a goblin village, but really it's an AI potato farm. Shouldn't we be punished for not understanding our prey? You run into the goblin village, you get shot by arrows coming from various directions. Retreat and find a plan B.

That is just my opinion although I do understand that some people don't want the requirement of a party for certain content. I don't know the first thing about programming or game design. But I do believe 'realistic' and reasonable difficulty is a good thing. Why make it a goblin village if it isn't going to act like a goblin village? Make it something else entirely. Not everything on the surface of Verra needs to be farmable by a solo player.

Dayuhan

AI intelligence should correspond to the mobs relative intelligence. Creatures that are capable of making judgement calls, i.e. they have some basic intelligence, should adjust their combat style based on whether they are stronger than their adversary or being over-powered. For example a goblin mob might attack from ambush, hoping for some quick easy kills, but if they are faced with uneven odds they would retreat and regroup - possibly to attack again with reinforcements.

However, creatures that live by instinct should react with the fight or flight tactic - for example a herd of deer would likely flee first, but a pack of wolves are more likely to attack.

sunfrog

So smart that I can use it to manipulate you into voting me in as mayor.

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