March 13, 2009

Braaain, mooore Braaain...

The mission was simple: Find the camp in the middle of the forest, descry the revolting Orcs and kill their leader Cannot Rememba. The young Choppa sneaked through the woods, enemies everywhere. There! The camp he was looking after... how would he disable the guards standing watch? Crouching up to every single one, slit their throat? The final solution was a different one: In plain daylight he walked in the middle of the camp, used a knife to attract the boss from their middle and killed him slow and painfully. While everyone was standing around, looking dumb and shouting: Braaain, mooore Braaain...

One major thing that bugs me while leveling - and i had nearly forgotten about - is the stupid Artificial Intelligence (AI) the NPC monsters have. You can walk in the middle of a camp and if you start killing stuff, it does not matter how long you're standing there or what noises you make, NO ONE, not a single guard, will be alerted by it. In the high level dungeons you'll always pull packs. It does not have to be some major brain surgery, but just *a little bit more* AI from the NPCs would increase the fun to kill stuff in PvE. Is this a sympton of wanting to make computer games easier and easier? I know i like a higher challenge rating then most... but c'mon, at least *some* challenge that keeps you thinking. More patrols to watch after, mobs alerting each other at a medium distance, etc.

On a sidenote: Didn't Mythic say they fixed the wounded mobs running away?!? On my Choppa i regularly encounter mobs running away wounded at full speed and then they run so far away that they leash back and reset to full health again. SO annoying!

3 comments:

Proximo said...

Ohhh I SO fully and wholeheartidly agree with you! The mobs in WoW are not especially intelligent compared to whats out on the market now, but compared to WAR they are friggin einsteins every one of them ><
Mobs screaming for help when low on health, mobs running towards the camp and getting friends, more mobs linked to eachother (you can basically singlepull your way from 1 to 40 in WAR without problems), more patrols. Give us a challenge!

I think WAR PvE AI suffers from Mythic focusing a lot on making RvR good, which is fine by me, but I wish there had been more AI.

And the mobs still run off at warpspeed when they get low on health as you said, annoying as hell! ><

jason said...

I think that EQ1 did a good job of this. Damage brought the pack. And using proximity agro to single pull (getting close enough to agro, without causing any damage) only worked if you got it just right, otherwise you had adds.

I also liked the subtle faction levels in EQ1. A Kobold, for instance, would not attack you as a noob. Only after you had slaughtered a few would they become KOS to avenge the death of their brothers.

Anonymous said...

I liked the DAoC baf code - if you brought a group you got groups of mobs and bonus xp. Think they nabbed it from EQ.

There are some tricky aggro areas with patrolling mobs - dark elf chapter 10 is a pain with them ;) (well, as a zealot where adds = death more often than not). And they make me angry ;) though they should make me think "ooh this is more real!".

I wrote a little article about why people actually don't want smarter AI on mobs back in February:

http://warofalts.wordpress.com/2009/02/04/make-the-mobs-clever/