Importance of unpredictability

This is a very common promise which has never been met but you dev guys seem to put your heart into AOC and if anyone can pull this off it is you. I am talking about NPC unpredictability in their behavior.

What flatlines my MMO experience is to see mindless NPC bot creatures that move back and forth a simple pattern, chase you for $range meters, switch to retreat indestructible mode and continue their pattern. Or creatures that seem more complex but after googling you got that standard pattern that works every time reducing it to a test of muscle memory.

I know in the end it is just parameters and patterns but how about adding some chaos into equation? Give creatures something called “nature” which affects their decisions, make their nature affected by weather, number of close by players, time of year, mating season, wind, balance of the zone or maybe even some developer set global chaos parameter that they set when having morning coffee break.

By applying this to NPCs you could make their behavior an indicator of their actions / threat. Players could learn to recognize threat from the actual behavior: beasts more powerful are not scared of you, some want to eat you and beasts weaker will flee. Some are maybe curious, some don’t even notice you, some want to make friends.

This kind of decision tree is hard to pull off but once you get it working it should just be there for whatever creature you will come up with.

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peksi

To introduce more variables into the ai behavior I think a viable solution is to delegate the new variable calculation to a external system or systems. I think the biggest challenge may be data transfer between these distributed systems due millions of parallel transactions.

But the player driven world in itself introduces a lot of unpredictability to the game already which is incredible.

Vaknar

Dygz wrote: »

AI is a programming limitation.
The design for this game does not have a goal to try to overcome those limitations.
That being said:

One of the design elements that we're implementing into our raids is that the raid will not be exactly the same every single time. You're going to have variables that can't necessarily be pre-planned out for. You can pre-plan out for a lot of the raid like how many DPS do you need and healers and support; where the key position and all that kind of stuff; but I think the compelling aspect of Ashes raiding will be the difficulty in achieving this content and having that content change from session to session as well. We want there to be variables that get manifested by you know what type of node got developed elsewhere. Is he going to have acolytes or cultists? What will the acolytes have skills [available] to them? What kit is the boss gonna have? What available skill repertoire will the boss be able to [wield]? ... A lot of those systems are influenced obviously by world development. So the raid kind of takes into account at what stage has the world developed: Are there two metropolises now available in the world? Okay well let's activate this skill in this skill. Now you have five metropolises, well now all these skills have been activated. Are there are they all economic nodes? Are they all military nodes? That we can change things based on that stuff. And it really is a threat assessment from the environment against the players.
---Steven

Combat itself will be pretty intricate mechanics-wise. We're going to have different phases of the bosses, there's going to be a lot of adds stuff, there's going to be random oriented skill usage. We're not going to have telegraphed templates on the ground, but we will have telegraphed animations, so it's going to be location, mobility, strategic. It will be something that can not be repeatable in the exact same way from raid to raid, but has a variance between the combat, so raiders are going to have to be fluid in thinking on their feet.
---Steven

Very well said, @Dygz !

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