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

[Damion Schubert]

[ Amanda Walker ]
> 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?

Consider this: the AI in most combat-oriented games is the 'puzzle'.
It's the cards that are flipped over in solitaire, or the pieces
that fall in tetris.

Players often claim that they want 'realistic' AIs, but in general,
what they want are puzzles that they can figure out, and puzzles
that they can gauge the risk of playing before engaging.

And for what it's worth, I've gotten more mileage making interesting
puzzles than realistic ones.

> 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.

There's no doubt that good AI can make the game more immersive.  My
point was simple that immersiveness != fun, and that the
fun-puzzle-challenge part of AI design should come first.  However,
a fun and immersive game is better than a fun and non-immersive
game, so the best is if you can manage both.
 
> 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 :-)).

Players generally hate it when the rules change like this.  They
want to know that there is a certain degree of predictability in the
world, and that if they could kill something yesterday, they can
today.

This is, in fact, subtly an important part of a MUD's social glue.
When a newbie asks where to go to level, it makes one feel quite the
elder to be able to give a knowledgeable response.

That being said, if you can do a system of alarm, info exchange, etc
and still create an interesting, enjoyable puzzle with a reasonably
predictable degree of risk assessment on the player's part, that
would be the ideal (and is, incidentally, what I target as well).

--d

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