[MUD-Dev] FEAR Animat style AI for Quake 2

[Damion Schubert]

>From Amanda Walker
> On 12/2/02 12:14 PM, Freeman, Jeff <jfreeman at soe.sony.com> wrote:
 
>> In my experience, players don't even like it when AI is given the
>> ability to determine that a given battle is a lost cause, that
>> the AI ought to just run away.  They like the AI to be a bit
>> stupid.
 
> Indeed.  They want opponents to be challenging but generally
> beatable.  This translates to "I don't want to lose more than 1 in
> 5."  It's weird how 20% pops in people's assessments of how
> prevalent something is.  If you give someone a perfectly evenly
> matched opponent, they will interpret themselves as being at a
> disadvantage, and will go to quite impressive lengths to "even the
> odds", where "even" seems to happen at about that "lose 20% of the
> time" boundary.

One of the things that I like about EverQuest is that they do not
waste any time trying to create AI that thinks like a person.
Instead, they tried to create an AI that was interesting to
disassemble with your friends.  People complain that it's
unrealistic behavior, but it actually can be a lot of fun, and quite
challenging to take apart a small group of NPCs, even though you
know exactly how their AI is going to work.

Players themselves use all sorts of nasty tricks in order to get a
leg up - sneaking up on monsters, fearing or paralyzing the
monster's healer buddies, attacking monsters when they're wounded,
teleporting out if they get hurt, etc.  While some monster AIs
exhibit some of these techniques periodically, if an AI made use of
all of these tendencies, I predict that that game would lose
population very quickly.

--d
all of a players

_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev mailing list
MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
https://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev