Kolya on 24/2/2012 at 09:48
I generally agree that enemy AI hasn't come far since the days of Thief.
But as so often with this kind of discussion, the thing about guards returning to their posts after searching for a while is a gameplay vs. realism thing. If they indeed kept on searching until they had rooted out the cause, the game would be over as soon as a guard notices you. That would be realistic but less fun to play. Instead the player gets a tense moment that signals he did something wrong and then another chance to tackle the situation without reloading.
By the way, you can set the time they keep on searching. On Normal difficulty it's 7 seconds after you reached a hideout. See aio/difficulty.cfg where you will find a multiplier for searchTime.
Koki on 24/2/2012 at 11:17
Being spotted once = eternal alert was in Metro 2033 and everyone bitched about it.
faetal on 24/2/2012 at 12:10
I quite like the stealth in Skyrim, where you get someone hunting about in the dark for a few seconds, before deciding that it was their imagination, while stepping over the corpse of the person they were chatting to 5 seconds ago who now has an arrow sticking out of their eye.
Muzman on 24/2/2012 at 13:16
Quote Posted by Kolya
I generally agree that enemy AI hasn't come far since the days of Thief.
But as so often with this kind of discussion, the thing about guards returning to their posts after searching for a while is a gameplay vs. realism thing. If they indeed kept on searching until they had rooted out the cause, the game would be over as soon as a guard notices you. That would be realistic but less fun to play. Instead the player gets a tense moment that signals he did something wrong and then another chance to tackle the situation without reloading.
It ceases to be tense once you realise you can do it X number of times and they won't alter their behaviour in the slightest. You can even knock a guy out and have his friends revive him multiple times and it alters nothing.
But anyway, it isn't longer searching that's would do the trick. It's better searching. If in the numerous times I alerted some guy and he said "See that? Door opened and no one came through" and he actually came <i>in</i> said room and looked around and checked behind the door etc, right away that's much better. He doesn't have to check under the desk or in the vents or whatever, just do something a person would do, instead of 'move to alert location-look around 2 foot radius minus obstructions until alert level drops-return to patrol'. I can buy that more. It also adds nothing to difficulty as that's surely what we expect in that situation.
Context has to matter as well. I don't expect Belltower guys on the street to pursue me to the ends of the earth, or twitchy gang members. But if you are deep in some brightly lit, heavily guarded base no one is supposed to know about with only one or two ways in or out they should behave accordingly when the alarm goes off or someone shoots at them. (hell they even did this in back in Thief. Set off the alarm in Ramirez's place and some guards leave patrol and stand to at the entrance and various other important locations and they all become semi alert).
It's true that if you took DX:HRs existing scenarios and added much meaner and more elaborate AI it would be very hard and likely no fun. But once you have that you design to the AI. I was pretty tense at the idea that in the raid on
The Alice Pods these hard dudes were going to actually head up in teams and clear the rooms. That would have been a pretty challenging evasion scenario. What mods you have installed could make a big difference to how that plays out. But no, they just meandered about by themselves. You might have to redesign a bit to make my version playable, but that's the way it goes. Anything to avoid yet another open plan space with oblivious dudes wandering about aimlessly. As far as the AI itself, in a reactive game about variety let's actually have some various reactivity.
faetal on 24/2/2012 at 13:25
Anyone else finding that the more realistic / polished games get in general, the more criticism they get for things which don’t behave like real life? Of course the DX guys act the same after 3 times of waking up their friend – they’re not people. What developers probably have to decide is whether extra dev time (thus money) spent on introducing more and more refined logic to the NPCs will see a concomitant increase in gameplay quality or just end up as diminishing returns. I doubt all of the studios are blind to these crriticsms and put out games with sub par AI because they’re incompetent. My guess is that the realtionship between development time and AI complexity isn’t a linear one either and that in order to go up notches in complexity, you’d nee dto spend exponentially more time writing code rather than just a bit of extra time. That would explain why the AI hasn’t improved so much more than the notion that studios are just dropping the ball repeatedly. I could be wrong of course, but that’s my take.
Muzman on 24/2/2012 at 14:14
To some extent if things get more detailed in some areas you want more detail everywhere, yeah. But it depends on the game. A game like DX:HR really would benefit from it, I reckon.
It's also that stealth, like every broad gameplay style, is kinda rote. There aren't really any great audience expectations for ambitious detail. It's like dumb quests in RPGs, boss fights, QTEs. It's McDonalds design. No call for reinventing the wheel (it's hard enough getting it round in the first place).
I also suspect Stealth is considered a harder sell, to audiences and publishers. So they're not going to scare anyone with grand feature lists.
faetal on 24/2/2012 at 14:22
It'll likely take a daring developer to push the envelope on stealth. Perhaps a game will be made where the intricate stealth system is the main draw, and will show other developers how it can be done, saving them the time and money into developing it themselves.
Pyrian on 24/2/2012 at 16:42
*walks into room carrying large box*
"There he is!"
*drops box in middle of room and ducks behind it*
"Where'd he go!?"
Yeah, DX:HR didn't improve enemy AI in stealth, though it's still better AI than DX1 in a firefight (not that that's saying much). But, I would expect more out of a more focused stealth game.
henke on 24/2/2012 at 17:55
Yeah well I guess I should clarify that when I said VA's stealth was as good as DXHR's I meant that I enjoyed it as much and thought it worked well as a game-mechanic, not a simulation of how people actually behave in real life.
Jason Moyer on 24/2/2012 at 19:20
The problem with realistic stealth is that when it's actually used in a game (see: anything by Bohemia Interactive) everyone complains about eagle-eyed AI and how impossible sneaking around is. The Spec Ops missions in BIS games are phenomenal, imho, because you spend half the time hoping to hell no one sees you as you lie in a goddamn bush and the other half not shooting that guard that's standing 5 feet in front of you because you don't want to die in a hail of bullets and/or blow the entire mission.
On the other hand, it's stupid that most stealth games don't even go as far as the original Thief did when it comes to alrerted AI states and so forth.
