I thought there was an option to play against bots in most MOBAs. Meh, I don't play them either, so I don't really know.
(Jul 16th, 2018, 11:12 PM)Moonface Wrote: [ -> ]Also while less common nowadays, I have never liked AI that detect the player, and then pretend they no longer exist the second you get out of their sight. The Evil Within 2 does this worse than any other game I've played recently, as you can have an enemy chase you and despite standing in plain sight of them, there is a point they stop following you and then go back to where they were before. Rarely enemies don't do that, and when they don't the chases are superbly tense if you're not equipped to deal with them, but a lot of the time you'll just see enemies stopping at an invisible line and acting as if you're no longer in front of them.
This is a common thing in RPGs, especially MMOs, and it's known as the enemy's "aggro sphere". The idea behind the aggro sphere is that it gives you time to plan the situation while still being in real-time, as well as being able to run away from a fight if you're outmatched. Regulating aggro, including aggro spheres, is one of the most important skills in an MMO, after all. That said, this is common to
RPGs, so what the hell it's doing in a survival horror game like The Evil Within 2, I don't even know.
As far as discussing the topic further goes, I've already referred to Mark Brown's episode on what makes good AI, but
I'mma link it again because it's that interesting. Meanwhile, I'll mention two things that I'm sure I've mentioned before: The Combine Gunship and the AI in FEAR. I love these two examples because they're examples in how intelligence can be coded in, whether by accident or on purpose. The Combine Gunship trying to shoot down a rocket was a bug in the code, being coded to fire at the most significant threat. Note that it doesn't specify the player, just the most significant threat. The code then took the ball from there, and decided that the rocket that was now going to damage it became a more significant threat than the player, and focused fire on that. After playtesting and finding the "bug", because of playtesters positive reactions, they kept it and even refined it into what it is in the game.
FEAR's Replica Soldiers (that's the name of the main enemy in the game), meanwhile, are an example of emergent behavior as far as AI coding goes. Emergent behavior, or Emergence in general, is what happens when complex and sophisticated structures or concepts follow from much simpler rules. A snowflake is a good example of it, because it's just water freezing into a crystal, but because of the rules of chemistry, it creates beautiful and complex patterns and shapes.
Based on what I understood from their paper (
Which you can also hear in presentation form), FEAR's AI was more intentional than that, but what I do know is that the soldiers are hard-coded with far more basic ideas: Move in groups, provide covering fire, take cover, and move relative to the player (yes, they can also jump through windows and stuff like that, but that's not the point). These parameters lead to FEAR having what is still considered some of the best AI in a video game, 13 years after the game's release. I actually bought the game myself on this alone, just because I wanted to see for myself how this AI works in practice. They didn't disappoint. Right from the start, they'll keep you on your toes, and it's amazing to think that a game from that long ago has AI where even a small squad of soldiers will always be a legitimate worry if you let them operate.
As far as the bad goes...well, I'mma look at Gen 1 Pokemon for that. Yes, we all know it's a mess of a game, but one of the interesting things is that the AI is coded to always use attacks that are super-effective when possible, and to not use moves that are not very effective (i.e. does half damage), even if the move doesn't do damage. This can lead to...interesting side-effects, especially a notorious softlock with Lorelei (though you basically have to do it on purpose for it to happen) where if you Rage with a fighting or poison-type pokemon, she will infinitely use Rest with her Dewgong, causing an infinite battle. I call it notorious because Pokemon Yellow was specifically hard-coded to check if the pokemon you're fighting is Lorelei's Dewgong, and will change her AI if it is, which is a kludge if I've ever heard of one.
