[MUD-Dev] AI not worth doing in our games?

[amanda at alfar.com]

Sasha Hart <hart.s at attbi.com> wrote:

> Do we really want to say that dumber is better? Or is it just that
> some 'smarts' are poorly constructed or poorly situated?

It depends entirely on how those "smarts" are applied.  I thought
that Adam's remarks about Q3 bots vs. UT bots were right on target.
I don't play FPSs very much, but when I do, it's UT or UT2003.  One
of the reasons is that in UT, the bots project the gestalt of being
players: that is, that they are playing *in* the game, not playing
*as* the game.

One of the reasons that NPCs are generally treated as vending
machines in MUDs and MMORPGs is that essentially, that's what they
are.  They never go out of their shops and do the sorts of things
that players do.  And so, if you make players go through any
non-trivial amount of dialog, they don't interpret this as being
more immersive, they interpret as being a more cumbersome user
interface for their game.  I think they are correct in this
interpretation.

Thread-tying for a moment with the AC2 thread... one of the truly
wonderful things about AC2 is that there are no NPCs.  No shops, no
artificial dialogs, etc.  There are a few "guardians", which are
mobs that protect a resource, and a few quest triggers that resemble
NPCs, but by and large the only dialog you engage in is with other
players.  This is a very refreshing change, and makes it *more*
immersive.  Game UI is game UI, and is distinct from in-game
interaction.

EQ, in contrast, has way too much in-game UI.  Quests, for example,
are all about magic words in dialog.  I found in extremely tedious;
while I was playing, I ended up looking up "quest guides" just so I
wouldn't have to spend minutes trying variations on dialog lines
until I hit the magic word.  It sure didn't feel like cheating--it
felt like looking things up in a UI reference manual.

Back to AI.

AI is great when it makes the game more immersive.  If AI is driving
a mob, it's less immersive if the mob can see through walls, always
aim perfectly, and generally take advantage of game state that is
not directly available to the player.

Now, there may not be any alternative when it comes to
implementation, since AI does not have an actual intelligent agent
behind it.  However, for the sake of internal consistency it pays to
make the AI's actions at least plausibly based only on the same kind
of information the player has.

This doesn't mean that traditional game strategies need to work.
For example, I am not fond of the "pull one monster at a time away
from a group, since they don't care if their groupmates are getting
slaughtered" approach.  Mobs that can exchange info, raise the
alarm, recognize that the last time this character came through
their dungeon he/she did X, Y, and Z, etc. could well add to the
immersive quality (imagine entering a lower-level dungeon with a
higher level character, killing a couple mobs and having the rest
hide until you leave :-)).


Amanda Walker

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