Raneman25 wrote:
I said FAR CRY 2 not FAR CRY
Wow, your density amazes even me. How, exactly, am I meant to base an opinion on the hype of a game not even released yet?
Bethesda touted Oblivion's Radiant AI to high heavens, yet when it came out, time constraints had caused the AI to be dumbed down considerably. Bottom line is, AI is rarely as good as the manufacturers make out. I've seen Ubisoft do some pretty impressive things over the years, but nobody, I repeat
nobody has ever managed to pull realistic AI out of their ass- I mean, hats.
Flanking, teamwork, and tactics do not make good AI. It makes
difficult AI. Remember that the definition of AI is not Artificial Challenge, it's Artificial
Intelligence. It's not about how difficult it is for the player to kill someone, it's about how they react to their situation, how they 'assess' the situation, and ultimately how they 'decide' which is the best course of action.
Take my analogy before. Something that you believe is a person has just run past you at a superhuman speed. They were moving so fast that you aren't sure who or what it was, but you know it wasn't one of your fellow soldiers. As before, you were too slow to draw a bead and start firing, but you have a sudden brainwave: you radio the soldiers ahead of where the person/thing was moving, and alert them that, hey, there's something not quite human here, and it's heading your way, coming from the southeast. This way, they are forewarned and can set up an ambush, or at least be ready.
In FarCry, none of the soldiers I left alive did this. The soldiers were as oblivious to my location - even my existence - as they would have been had I killed those other soldiers.
Conversely, if you hear a noise and think there's someone nearby, you're not going to 'know' where that person is and immediately zero in on their exact position. Soldiers several hundred meters up the road aren't going to instantly turn around and run towards me just because I manned an M60. In fact, even after I've fired the first shot, killing one of their own men, they aren't going to turn around immediately, because behind them is safe, as far as they know, so they're going to check the immediate area
in front of them, in case the enemy set up an ambush
in front of them.
Now, a lot of the games I've played tend to have *some* features of realistic AI, but lack others. Some have most of the features, but then an enemy will run straight into a wall and keep running at it (something that really
needs to be fixed in all games is collision detection with walls)!
The point is, AI just never quite seems to work. I'm not sure exactly why this is; game developers have had a long time to ponder this problem, but ultimately, every game I've played has a flaw in the AI that can be exploited to make the game significantly easier, and a flaw that makes the AI unrealistic; often the two are one and the same. In Mount&Blade, none of the enemies time their swings properly; the archers' aim tends to be off; et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.